*

Heaving her white breast to the balmy air,
Like guilty beauty, chastened, and more fair:
Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light

She fears to perfume, perfuming the night:
And Clytia pondering between many a sun,*
While pettish tears adown her petals run:
And that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth+-
And died, ere scarce exalted into birth,
Bursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing
Its way to Heaven, from garden of a king:
And Valisnerian lotus thither flownt

From struggling with the waters of the Rhone:
And thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante !§
Isola d'oro!-Fior di Levante !

And the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever ||

With Indian Cupid down the holy river

Fair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given

To bear the goddess' song, in odours, up to Heaven: ¶

Clytia-The Chrysanthemum Peruvianum, or, to employ a betterknown term, the turnsol-which turns continually towards the sun, covers itself, like Peru, the country from which it comes, with dewy clouds which cool and refresh its flowers during the most violent heat of the day.-B. de St. Pierre.

+ There is cultivated in the king's garden at Paris a species of serpentine aloes without prickles, whose large and beautiful flower exhales a strong odour of the vanilla during the time of its expansion, which is very short. It does not blow till towards the month of July ; you then perceive it gradually open its petals, expand them, fade, and die.-St. Pierre.

There is found in the Rhone a beautiful lily of the Valisnerian kind. Its stem will stretch to the length of three or four feet-thus preserving its head above water in the swellings of the river.

§ The Hyacinth.

It is a fiction of the Indians, that Cupid was first seen floating in one of these down the river Ganges, and that he still loves the cradle of his childhood.

¶ And golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints --Rev. of St. John.

"Spirit that dwellest where,
In the deep sky,
The terrible and fair,
In beauty vie!
Beyond the line of blue-

The boundary of the star
Which turneth at the view

Of thy barrier and thy bar-
Of the barrier overgone

By the comets who were cast
From their pride, and from their throne,
To be drudges till the last-
To be carriers of fire

(The red fire of their heart)

With speed that may not tire,

And with pain that shall not 'part

Who livest that we know—

In Eternity-we feel

But the shadow of whose brow

What spirit shall reveal?

Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace,
Thy messenger, hath known
Have dream'd for thy Infinity
A model of their own

*

The Humanitarians held that God was to be understood as having really a human form.-Vide Clarke's Sermons, vol. i. page 26, fol. edit. The drift of Milton's argument leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.-Dr. Sumner's Notes on Milton's Christian Doctrine.

This opinion, in spite of many testimonies to the contrary, could never have been very general. Andeus, a Syrian of Mesopotamia, was condemned for the opinion as heretical. He lived in the beginning of the fourth century. His disciples were called Anthropomorphites.— Vide Du Pin.

Among Milton's minor poems are these lines:

VOL. III.

Dicite sacrorum præsides nemorum Deæ, etc.
Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine

Natura solers finxit humanum genus?

Thy will is done, Oh, God!
The star hath ridden high
Thro' many a tempest, but she rode
Beneath thy burning eye;
And here, in thought, to thee-
In thought that can alone
Ascend thy empire, and so be
A partner of thy throne-
By winged Fantasy,*

My embassy is given,

Till secrecy shall knowledge be
In the environs of Heaven."

She ceased-and buried then her burning cheek
Abashed, amid the lilies there, to seek

A shelter from the fervour of His eye;

For the stars trembled at the Deity.

She stirred not-breathed not-for a voice was there How solemnly pervading the calm air!

A sound of silence on the startled ear

Which dreamy poets name "the music of the sphere."
Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call
"Silence "—which is the merest word of all.
All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings-
But ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high
The eternal voice of God is passing by,
And the red winds are withering in the sky!

"What tho' in worlds which sightless cycles run,†

Link'd to a little system, and one sun

Eternus, incorruptus, æquævus polo,
Unusque et universus exemplar Dei.

And afterwards,

Non cui profundum Cæcitas lumen dedit
Dirceus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, etc.
* Seltsamen Tochter Jovis

Seinem Schosskinde

Der Phantasie.-Goethe.

+ Sightless-too small to be seen.-Legge,

Where all my love is folly and the crowd
Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud,
The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath--
(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)
What tho' in worlds which own a single sun
The sands of Time grow dimmer as they run,
Yet thine is my resplendency, so given
To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven.
Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,
With all thy train, athwart the moony sky-
Apart-like fire-flies in Sicilian night,*
And wing to other worlds another light!
Divulge the secrets of thy embassy

To the proud orbs that twinkle-and so be
To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban
Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man!"

Up rose the maiden in the yellow night,
The single-mooned eve!-on Earth we plight
Our faith to one love-and one moon adore-
The birthplace of young Beauty had no more.
As sprang that yellow star from downy hours
Up rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,
And bent o'er sheeny mountain and dim plain.
Her way-but left not yet her Therasaan reign.†

* I have often noticed a peculiar movement of the fire-flies ;-they will collect in a body and fly off, from a common centre, into innumer able radii.

Therasæa, or Therasea, the island mentioned by Seneca, which in a moment arose from the sea to the eyes of astonished inariners.

PART II.

HIGH on a mountain of enamelled head-
Such as the drowsy shepherd on his bed
Of giant pasturage lying at his ease,
Raising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees
With many a muttered "hope to be forgiven"
What time the moon is quadrated in Heaven—
Of rosy head, that towering far away
Into the sunlit ether, caught the ray

Of sunken suns at eve-at noon of night,

While the moon danced with the fair stranger light—
Upreared upon such height arose a pile

Of gorgeous columns on th' unburthened air,
Flashing from Parian marble that twin smile
Far down upon the wave that sparkled there,
And nursled the young mountain in its lair.
Of molten stars their pavement, such as fall *
Thro' the ebon air, besilvering the pall
Of their own dissolution, while they die-
Adorning then the dwellings of the sky.

A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,
Sat gently on these columns as a crown-
A window of one circular diamond, there,
Looked out above into the purple air,

And rays from God shot down that meteor chain
And hallowed all the beauty twice again,
Save when, between th' Empyrean and that ring,
Some eager spirit flapped his dusky wing.
But on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen
The dimness of this world: that greyish green
That nature loves the best for Beauty's grave
Lurked in each cornice, round each architrave—
And every sculptured cherub thereabout
That from his marble dwelling peeréd out,

* Some star which, from the ruin'd roof

Of shaked Olympus, by mischance, did fall.-Milton.