To what pure beings, in a nobler sphere,10 Each scene of bliss revealed, since chaos fled, No more to part, to mingle tears no more! Its lights and shades, its sunshine and its showers; To watch the silent slumbers of a friend; There may these gentle guests delight to dwell, O thou! with whom my heart was wont to share Hail, MEMORY, hail! in thy exhaustless mine But can the wiles of Art, the grasp of Power, Snatch the rich relics of a well-spent hour? These, when the trembling spirit wings her flight, Pour round her path a stream of living light; And gild those pure and perfect realms of rest, Where Virtue triumphs, and her sons are blest! NOTES. PART I. (1) THESE were imagined to be the departed souls of virtuous men, who, as a reward of their good deeds in the present life, were appointed after death to the pleasing office of superintending the concerns of their immediate descendants. -Melmoth. (2) Virgil, in one of his Eclogues, describes a romantic attachment as conceived in such circumstances; and the description is so true to nature, that we must surely be indebted for it to some early recollection. "You were little when I first saw you. You were with your mother gathering fruit in our orchard, and I was your guide. I was just entering my thirteenth year, and just able to reach the boughs from the ground." So also Zappi, an Italian poet of the last century. -"When I used to measure myself with my goat and my goat was the tallest, even then I loved Clori." (3) I came to the place of my birth, and cried, "The friends of my youth, where are they?" And an echo answered, "Where are they?"- From an Arabic MS. (4) When a traveller, who was surveying the ruins of Rome, expressed a desire to possess some relic of its ancient grandeur, Poussin, who attended him, stooped down, and gathering up a handful of earth shining with small grains of porphyry, "Take this home," said he, “for your cabinet; and say, boldly, Questa è Roma Antica.” (5) Every man, like Gulliver in Lilliput, is fastened to some spot of earth, by the thousand small threads which habit and association are continually stealing over him. Of these, perhaps, one of the strongest is here alluded to. When the Canadian Indians were once solicited to emigrate, "What!" they replied, "shall we say to the bones of our fathers, Arise, and go with us into a foreign land?" (6) He wept; but the effort that he made to conceal his tears concurred with them to do him honor: he went to the mast-head, &c. - See Cook's First Voyage, book i. chap. 16. Another very affecting instance of local attachment is related of his fellow-countryman Potaveri, who came to Europe with M. de Bougainville. — See Les Jardins, chant. ii. Elle se leve sur son lict et se met à contempler la France encore, et tant qu'elle peut. -Brantôme. (To an accidental association may be ascribed some of the noblest efforts of human genius. The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire first conceived his design among the ruins of the Capitol ;* and to the tones of a Welsh harp are we indebted for the Bard of Gray. • "It was on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing there, while the bare-footed friars were singing verses in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea first started to my mind."- Memoirs of my Life. |