"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 How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ! Look, how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines* of bright gold; 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. 2 9-v. 1. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; 3 Phœbe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass. 7-iii. 1. 7-i. 1. 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 6 Peace, hoa, the moon sleeps with Endymion,* 7 Yon gray is not the morning's eye, 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow.f 8 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 The southern wind Doth play the trumpet to his purposes;§ And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves, 9-ii. 7. 9-v. 1. 35-iii. 5. 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; 11 As whence the sun 'gins his reflection 16-iii. 1. Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break; 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. Reflection of the moon. + Woody. That is, to the sun's, to which the sun portends by his unusual appearance. The opposite to comfort. |