BOOK IV. ODE I. TO VENUS.

Again? new tumults in my breast? Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest! I am not now, alas! the man As in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne. Ah, sound no more thy soft alarms, Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms. Mother too fierce of dear desires! Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires, To Number Five direct your doves, There spread round Murray all your blooming loves 10 Noble and young, who strikes the heart With every sprightly, every decent part; Equal, the injured to defend, To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend. He, with a hundred arts refined, Shall stretch thy conquests over half the kind; To him each rival shall submit, Make but his riches equal to his wit. Then shall thy form the marble grace, (Thy Grecian form) and Chloe lend the face: 20 His house, embosom'd in the grove, Sacred to social life and social love, Shall glitter o'er the pendant green, Where Thames reflects the visionary scene: Thither, the silver-sounding lyres Shall call the smiling Loves, and young Desires; There, every Grace and Muse shall throng, Exalt the dance, or animate the song; There, youths and nymphs, in consort gay, Shall hail the rising, close the parting day. 30 With me, alas! those joys are o'er; For me, the vernal garlands bloom no more. Adieu![170] fond hope of mutual fire, The still believing, still-renew'd desire; Adieu! the heart-expanding bowl, And all the kind deceivers of the soul! But why? ah, tell me, ah, too dear! Steals down my cheek th' involuntary tear? Why words so flowing, thoughts so free, Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of thee? 40 Thee, dress'd in fancy's airy beam, Absent I follow through th' extended dream; Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms, And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms; And swiftly shoot along the Mall, Or softly glide by the canal, Now shown by Cynthia's silver ray, And now on rolling waters snatch'd away.

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PART OF THE NINTH ODE OF THE FOURTH BOOK.

1 Lest you should think that verse shall die, Which sounds the silver Thames along, Taught, on the wings of truth to fly Above the reach of vulgar song;

2 Though daring Milton sits sublime, In Spenser, native Muses play; Nor yet shall Waller yield to time, Nor pensive Cowley's moral lay.

3 Sages and chiefs long since had birth Ere Caesar was, or Newton named; These raised new empires o'er the earth, And those, new heavens and systems framed.

4 Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! They had no poet, and they died. In vain they schemed, in vain they bled! They had no poet, and are dead.

THE SATIRES OF DR JOHN DONNE, DEAN OF ST PAUL'S,[171] VERSIFIED.

'Quid vetat et nosmet Lucilî scripta legentes Quaerere, num illius, num rerum dura negârit Versiculos natura magis factos, et euntes Mollius?'

HOR.

SATIRE II.

Yes; thank my stars! as early as I knew This town, I had the sense to hate it too: Yet here, as ev'n in Hell, there must be still One giant-vice, so excellently ill, That all beside, one pities, not abhors; As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.

I grant that poetry's a crying sin; It brought (no doubt) the Excise and Army in: Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how, But that the cure is starving, all allow. 10 Yet like the papist's is the poet's state, Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate!

Here a lean bard, whose wit could never give Himself a dinner, makes an actor live; The thief condemn'd, in law already dead, So prompts, and saves a rogue who cannot read. Thus as the pipes of some carved organ move, The gilded puppets dance and mount above. Heaved by the breath the inspiring bellows blow: The inspiring bellows lie and pant below. 20

One sings the fair