PAINTINGS

OF

NATURE AND THE PASSIONS.

66

“The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and de

scriptions, 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

OP

NATURE AND THE PASSIONS.

1
How sweet the moonlight 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 ;t
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.

7-iii. 1. 3

Phæbe doth behold
Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass.

7-i. 1.

4 The moon, like to a silver bow, New bent in heaven.

7-i. 1.

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

9-ii. 7.

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

9-v. 1.

7 Yon gray is not the morning's eye, 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow.f

35-ii. 5.

8 The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.

21-i. 4.

9
How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon buskys hill! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.

The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes
And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,
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 meager cloddy earth to glittering gold.

16-iii. 1.

11 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.

12 The weary sun hath made a golden set,