TO DELIA. Look, Delia, how w' esteem the half-blown rose, No sooner spreads her glory in the air, But straight her wide-blown pomp comes to decline; Daniel, Son. 36. summer's honour.] Honour is frequently used by our old poets for beauty. The Latins used honos in the same manner for pulchritudo. As in Horace: Non semper idem floribus est honos B. II. Od. ii. A VISION, UPON THIS CONCEIT OF THE FAIRY QUEEN. METHOUGHT I saw the grave where Laura lay, At whose approach, the soul of Petrarch wept, SLEEP, silence' child, sweet father of soft rest, Sole comforter of minds with grief oppress'd. * On this subject poets of all ages and nations have been very eloquent; suffice it to say, that Shakspeare, in his Henry the Fourth, Part II. Act III. Sc. i. has surpassed every thing that has hitherto ap Lo, by thy charming rod all breathing things Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace, Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath, Drummond, Edinb. 1616. peared on the same subject. And his admirers may safely defy the most bigoted and industrious scholars to produce, from the collected works of all antiquity, an invocation of such transcendant merit : Since I am thine, O come, &c. In the original spirit of the Greek Epigram, the following lines are composed, and, as I have been informed, were intended to have been placed under a statue of Somnus, in the garden of the late learned James Harris, Esq. of Salisbury. It will be no derogation to their beauties to compare them with the conclusion of Drummond's Son net: AD SOMNUM. Somne veni, et quanquam certissima mortis imago es, Huc ades, haud abiture cito: nam sic sine vitâ Vivere, quam suave est, sic sine morte mori! It may be necessary to inform some readers, that they are written by the present Poet Laureat*. In Popham's Selecta Poemata, p. 57, they occur; but they appear to have undergone a revisal considerably for the better, in the copy from which I have printed them. A translation of them is to be found in the Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1775, p. 144. * That is, the late Thomas Warton. Editor. ΤΟ THE RIVER ANKER. CLEAR Anker, on whose silver-sanded shore, Where sweet myrrh-breathing Zephyr in the Spring Say thus, fair brook, when thou shalt see thy queen, Fair Arden, thou my Tempe art aloné, Drayton, Son. 53. * Drayton has here, in the compass of fourteen lines only, been very profuse of fine compound epithets. Silver-sanded shore, soulshrined saint, milk-white swans, myrrh-breathing Zephyr, nectardropping showers, dew-impearled flowers. Browne compliments Drayton as the swain Who on the banks of Ancor tun'd his pipe. See B. I. Song v. p.179. I KNOW that all beneath the moon decays, DRUMMOND. RESTORE thy tresses to the golden ore; To Thetis give the honour of thy feet. The fairest states have fatal nights and days.] Fatal here means destined by the Fates, like the word fatalis in Latin: Non licuit fines Italos, fataliaque arva Nec tecum Ausonium, quicumque est, quærere Tybrim, En. V. 82. |