But come in Friendship's angel-guife:
Yet dearer thou than friendship art,
More tender spirit in thy eyes,
More sweet emotions at the heart.
O come with Goodness in thy train,
With Peace and Pleasure, void of storm,
And wouldst thou me for ever gain,
Put on Amanda's winning form.
To have been inferted in the fourth act of Sophonisba.
COME, gentle Venus! and assuage
A warring world, a bleeding age;
For Nature lives beneath thy ray,
The wintry tempests haste away,
A lucid calm invests the fea,
Thy native deep is full of thee;
The flowering earth, where'er you fly,
Is all o'er spring, all fun the sky;
A genial spirit warms the breeze;
Unfeen among the blooming trees,
The feather'd lovers tune their throat,
The defert growls a foften'd note;
Glad o'er the meads the cattle bound,
And love and harmony go round.
But chief into the human heart
You strike the dear delicious dart;
You teach us pleasing pangs to know,.
To languish in luxurious woe;
To feel the generous passions rife,
Grow good by gazing, mild by sighs;
Each happy moment to improve,
And fill the perfect year with love,
Come, thou delight of heaven and earth!
To whom all creatures owe their birth;
Oh come, fweet smiling! tender, come!
And yet prevent our final doom;
For long the furious God of war
Has crush'd us with his iron car,
Has rag'd along our ruin'd plains,
Has soil'd them with his cruel stains,
Has funk our youth in endless fleep,
And made the widow'd virgin weep.
Now let him feel thy wonted charms;
Oh! take him to thy twining arms!
And, while thy bosom heaves on his,
While deep he prints the humid kiss,
Ah! then his stormy heart controul,
And figh thyself into his foul.
HALL, mildly pleasing Solitude!
Companion of the wife and good,
But from whose holy, piercing eye,
The herd of fools and villains fly.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whisper'd talk,
Which innocence and truth imparts,
And melts the most obdurate hearts.
A thousand shapes you wear with ease,
And still in every shape you please.
Now wrapt in some mysterious dream,
A lone philosopher you seem;
Now quick from hill to vale you fly,
And now you sweep the vaulted sky.
A shepherd next, you haunt the plain,
And warble forth your oaten strain.
A lover now, with all the grace
Of that sweet passion in your face :
Then, calm'd to friendship, you afssume
The gentle-looking Hartford's bloom,
As, with her Mufidora, she
(Her Mufidora fond of thee)
Amid the long-withdrawing vale,
Awakes the rival'd nightingale.
Thine is the balmy breath of Morn, Just as the dew-bent rose is born; And while meridian fervours beat, Thine is the woodland dumb retreat: But chief, when evening scenes decay, And the faint landscape swims away, Thine is the doubtful soft decline, And that best hour of musing thine. Descending angels bless thy train, The virtues of the sage and swain; Plain Innocence, in white array'd, Before thee lifts her fearless head: Religion's beams around thee shine, And cheer thy glooms with light divine; About thee sports sweet Liberty: And rapt Urania sings to thee.
Oh! let me pierce thy secret cell,
And in thy deep recesses dwell.
Perhaps from Norwood's oak-clad hill,
When Meditation has her fill,
I just may cast my careless eyes
Where London's spiry turrets rife,
Think of its crimes, its cares, its pain,
Then shield me in the woods again.
BRITANNIA. A poem,
LIBERTY. Α ΡΟΣΜ. IN FIVE PARTS.
THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE, AN ALLECO-
RICAL POEM. IN TWOCANTOS.
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