More rancorous spite, more furious raging broils,
Than yet can be imagin'd or suppos'd.

257.

21-iv. 1.

He plays at quoits well; swears with a good grace; and wears his boot very smooth, like unto the sign of the leg.

258.

That strain again;—it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour.

259.

19-ii. 4.

. 4—i. 1.

If thou art rich, thou art poor;

For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee: Friends hast thou none.

5-iii. 1.

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."

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.

The firmament.

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-ey'd cherubins:

Such harmony is in immortal souls.

9-v. 1.

The sun with one eye vieweth all the world. 21-i. 4.

How bloodily the sun begins to peer

Above yon buskya hill! the day looks pale

At his distemperature.

The southern wind

Doth play the trumpet to his purposes b;
And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,
Foretells a tempest, and a blustering day.

The glorious sun,

Stays in his course, and plays the alchemist;
Turning, with splendour of his precious eye,

18-v. 1.

The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold. 16-iii. 1.

a Woody.

b That is, to the sun's, to which the sun portends by his unusual appearance.

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection

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

15-i. 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 patinesa 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 soulse;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

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

9-v. 1.

8.

The same.

Phoebe doth behold

7-iii. 1.

Her silvery visage in the watery glass,

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass. 7-i. 1.

The opposite to comfort.

7-i. 1.

d A small flat dish, used in the administration of the Eucharist.

e

"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.