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PAINTINGS OF NATURE

AND

THE PASSIONS.

"The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without loading, the sense they accompany.'

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Edinburgh Review.

"He gives a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions."

LESSING.

PAINTINGS

OF

NATURE AND THE PASSIONS.

1

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night, Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Look, how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 9—v. 1.

2

The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower.

3

Phoebe doth behold

Her silver visage in the watery glass,

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass.

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7-iii. 1.

7-i. l.

7-i. l.

a A small flat dish, used in the administration of the Eucharist. b"Touching musical harmony, whether by instrument or by voice, it being but of high and low sounds in a due proportionable disposition, such notwithstanding is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in the very part of man which is most divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the soul itself by nature is, or hath in it, harmony."---Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, B. v.

5

The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head
Spits in the face of heaven.

6

Peace, hoa, the moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awaked!

7

Yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow.d

8

9-ii. 7.

с

9-v. 1.

35-iii. 5.

The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.

9

How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon busky hill! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.

The southern wind

Doth play the trumpet to his

f

purposes; And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,

21-i. 4.

Foretells a tempest, and a blustering day. 18-v. 1.

10

The glorious sun, Stays in his course, and plays the alchemist; Turning, with splendour of his precious eye, The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold.

11

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection

16-iii. 1.

Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break;
So from that spring, whence comfort seem'd to come,
Discomfort swells.

12

The weary sun hath made a golden set,

15-i. 1.

A shepherd of Caria, who, for insolently soliciting Juno, was condemned to a sleep of thirty years; Luna visited him by night in a

cave of Mount Latmus.

d Reflection of the moon.

e Woody.

? That is, to the sun's, to which the sun portends by his unusual appearance. The opposite to comfort.

And, by the bright track of his fiery car,
Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.

13

The sun hath made his journal greeting to
The under-generation.h

14

24-v. 3.

5-iv. 3.

See how the morning opes her golden gates,
And takes her farewell of the glorious sun!i
How well resembles it the prime of youth,
Trimm'd like a younker, prancing to his love!

15

Look, love, what envious streaks

23-ii. 1.

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

16

Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.

17

The morning steals upon the night,

35-iii. 5.

36-i. 1.

Melting the darkness.

18

1-v. 1.

Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd.

19

Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,

5-iv. 2.

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty;

Who doth the world so gloriously behold,

That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold.

h Antipodes.

Poems.

Aurora takes for a time her farewell of the sun, when she dismisses him to his diurnal course.

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