Thy temple's pride design:

Its southern site, its truth complete,
Shall raise a wild enthusiast heat,
In all who view the shrine.

There Picture's toil shall well relate,
How Chance, or hard involving Fate,
O'er mortal bliss prevail:

The buskined Muse1 shall near her stand,
And, sighing, prompt her tender hand
With each disastrous tale.

There let me oft, retired by day,
In dreams of passion melt away,
Allowed with thee to dwell:

There, waste the mournful lamp of night,
Till, Virgin, thou again delight

To hear a British shell!

TO FEAR.

Thou, to whom the world unknown,
With all its shadowy shapes, is shown;
Who seest, appalled, the unreal scene,
While Fancy lifts the veil between:
Ah Fear! ah, frantic Fear!

I see, I see thee near.

I know thy hurried step; thy haggard eye!
Like thee I start: like thee disordered fly.
For lo! what monsters in thy train appear
Danger, whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fixed behold?
Who stalks his round, a hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm;
Or throws him on the ridgy steep
Of some loose hanging rock to sleep:
And with him thousand phantoms joined,
Who prompt to deeds accursed the mind:
And those, the fiends, who, near allied,
O'er Nature's wounds and wrecks preside;

1 See note 4, p. 332.

!

Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air,
Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare:
On whom that ravening brood of Fate,
Who lap the blood of Sorrow, wait:
Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,
And not look madly wild, like thee?

Epode.

In earliest Greece, to thee, with partial choice,
The grief-full muse addressed her infant tongue:
The maids and matrons, on her awful voice,
Silent and pale, in wild amazement hung.

Yet he, the bard' who first invoked thy name,
Disdained in Marathon its power to feel:
For not alone he nursed the poet's flame,
But reached from Virtue's hand the patriot's steel.

But who is he whom later garlands grace2:
Who left awhile o'er Hybla's dews to rove,
With trembling eyes thy dreary steps to trace,
Where thou and furies shared the baleful grove?

Wrapped in thy cloudy veil, the incestuous queen3, Sighed the sad call her son and husband heard, When once alone it broke the silent scene,

And he, the wretch of Thebes1, no more appeared.

O Fear! I know thee by my throbbing heart:
Thy withering power inspired each mournful line:
Though gentle Pity claim her mingled part,
Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine.

Antistrophe.

Thou who such weary lengths hast past,
Where wilt thou rest, mad Nymph, at last?
Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell,
Where gloomy Rape and Murder dwell?
Or in some hollowed seat,

'Gainst which the big waves beat,

1 Eschylus, the tragic poet, fought at the battle of Marathon.

2 Sophocles.

3 Jocasta.

4 Edipus.

Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought?
Dark power, with shuddering meek submitted thought,
Be mine, to read the visions old,

Which thy awakening bards have told :
And, lest thou meet my blasted view,
Hold each strange tale devoutly true;
Ne'er be I found, by thee o'erawed,
In that thrice-hallowed eve, abroad.
When ghosts, as cottage-maids believe,
Their pebbled beds permitted leave,
And goblins haunt, from fire, or fen,
Or mine, or flood, the works of men!

O thou, whose spirit most possessed
The sacred seat of Shakspere's breast
By all that from thy prophet broke,
In thy divine emotions spoke!
Hither again thy fury deal,

Teach me but once like him to feel:
His cypress wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

TO SIMPLICITY.

O thou, by Nature taught
To breathe her genuine thought

In numbers warmly pure, and sweetly strong;
Who first, on mountains wild,

In Fancy, loveliest child,

Thy babe, or Pleasure's, nursed the powers of song!

Thou, who with hermit heart,
Disdain'st the wealth of art,

And gauds, and pageant weeds, and trailing pall;
But com'st a decent maid,

In Attic1 robe arrayed,

O chaste, unboastful Nymph, to thee I call!

By all the honeyed store,
On Hybla's thymy shore,

1 The Attic style was remarkable for its simplicity.

2 A mountain in Sicily, famous for its honey.

By all her blooms, and mingled murmurs dear;
By her1 whose love-lorn woe

In evening musings slow,
Soothed sweetly sad Electra's poet's2 ear.

By old Cephissus3 deep,

Who spread his wavy sweep

In warbled wanderings round thy green retreat:
On whose enamelled side,

When holy Freedom died,

No equal haunt allured thy future feet.

O sister meek of Truth,

To my admiring youth

Thy sober aid and native charms infuse!
The flowers that sweetest breathe,

Though Beauty culled the wreath,
Still ask thy hand to range their ordered hues.

While Rome could none esteem
But virtue's patriot theme,

You loved her hills, and led her laureat band:
But stayed to sing alone

To one distinguished throne,

And turned thy face, and fled her altered land.

No more, in hall or bower,

The Passions own thy power;

Love, only Love, her forceless numbers mean:
For thou hast left her shrine;

Nor olive more, nor vine,

Shall gain thy feet to bless the servile scene.

Though taste, though genius, bless

To some divine excess,

Faint's the cold work till thou inspire the whole :
What each, what all supply,

May court, may charm our eye!

Thou, only thou, canst raise the meeting soul!

1 The nightingale.

2 Sophocles.

3 A river of Greece, that rises in

Phocis, and flows into the lake Copais in Boeotia.

Of these let others ask

To aid some mighty task;

I only seek to find thy temperate vale;
Where oft my reed might sound

To maids and shepherds round,

And all thy sons, O Nature, learn my tale.

ON THE POETICAL CHARACTER.

As once, -if, not with light regard,
I read aright that gifted bard,

-Him, whose school above the rest,
His loveliest Elfin queen has blessed1;-
One, only one, unrivalled fair 2,
Might hope the magic girdle wear,
At solemn turney hung on high,
The wish of each love-darting eye;
-Lo! to each other nymph in turn, applied,
As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand,
Some chaste and angel-friend to virgin fame,
With whispered spell had burst the starting band,
It left unblessed her loathed dishonoured side;
Happier, hopeless Fair, if never

Her baffled hand, with vain endeavour,
Had touched that fatal zone to her denied!

Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name!

To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven,
The cest of amplest power is given:

3

To few the godlike gift assigns,

To gird their best prophetic loins,

And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame!

The band, as fairy legends say,

Was wove on that creating day,

When He who called with thought to birth

Yon tented sky, this laughing earth,

And dressed with springs and forests tall,

And poured the main, engirting all,

1 Spenser.

2 Florimel; see Spenser, leg. 4.

3 Talisman.