When he to fair Olympia' pressed,

And stampt an image of himself, a sovereign of the world.
The listening crowd admire the lofty sound;

"A present deity!" they shout around;

"A present deity!" the vaulted roofs rebound:
With ravished ears

The monarch hears,

Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,

And seems to shake the spheres.

3. The praise of Bacchus,' then, the sweet musician sung,Of Bacchus, ever fair and ever young!

The jolly god in triumph comes !
Sound the trumpet! beat the drums!
Flushed with a purple grace,

He shows his honest face.

Now give the hautboys breath!-he comes! he comes!
Bacchus, ever fair and

young,

Drinking joys did first ordain :

Bacchus' blessings are a treasure;
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure :
Rich the treasure,

Sweet the pleasure;

Sweet is pleasure, after pain!

4. Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain

Fought all his battles o'er again;

And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain,

The master saw the mădnèss rise;

His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes!
And, while he heaven and earth defied,
Changed his hand and checked his pride.
He chose a mournful muse,
Soft pity to infuse :

He sung Darius,' great and good,
1 Olympia (o lim'pi a), or Juno,
the sister and wife of Jupiter.

1 Bacchus, or rather Dionysus, the beautiful, but effeminate god of wine, in mythology, represented as crowned with vine leaves.

'Da ri'us III., sometimes called Codomannus, in whose defeat by Alexander the Great the Persian empire was consummated, succeeded to the throne B. c. 336, and was killed 330.

By too severe a fate,
Fallen fallen! fallen! fallen!-
Fallen from his high estate.
And weltering in his blood!
Deserted at his utmost need
By those his former bounty fed,
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.

With downcast look the joyous victor sate,
Revolving, in his altered soul,

The various turns of fate below;
And now and then a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow.

5. The mighty master smiled to see

That love was in the next degree:
"Twas but a kindred strain to move;
For pity melts the mind to love.

Softly sweet, in Lydian' measures,
Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures:
War, he sung, is toil and trouble;
Honor but an empty bubble;

Never ending, still beginning,

Fighting still, and still destroying :
If the world be worth thy winning,

Think, oh think it worth enjoying!
Lovely Thaïs sits beside thee;

The

Take the good the gods provide thee.
many rend the skies with loud applause :
So love was crowned; but music won the cause.
The prince, unable to conceal his pain,

Gazed on the fair

Who caused his care,

And sighed and looked, sighed and looked,
Sighed and looked, and sighed again :

At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.

1

1 Lydian, pertaining to Lydia, a country of Asia Minor, or to its inhabitants: hence, soft; effeminate;

said especially of one of the ancient Greek modes or keys, the music in which was soft and pathetic.

6. Now strike the golden lyre again-
A louder yet, and yet a louder strain!
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark! hark!—the horrid sound
Has raised up his head!

As awaked from the dead,
And amazed, he stares around.
Revenge! revenge! Timotheüs cries—
See the furies arise!

See the snakes that they rear,

7.

8.

How they hiss in their hair,

And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

Behold a ghastly band,

Each a torch in his hand!

Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain,
Inglorious, on the plain.
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew.

Behold how they toss their torches on high!
How they point to the Persian abodes,

And glittering temples of their hostile gods!

The princes applaud with a furious joy;

And the king seized a flambeau, with zeal to destroy :
Thaïs led the way

To light him to his prey;

And, like another Helen,' fired another Troy.

Thus long ago,

Ere heaving bellows'learned to blow,
While organs yet were mute,-

Timotheüs to his breathing flute
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.

'Helen, a most beautiful woman of ancient Greece, whom Paris, the son of Priam, king of Troy, stole from the arms of her husband, Men

eläüs, who, with the other Greek chiefs, resolved to avenge her abduction. Hence rose the Trojan war. Bellows, (běl' lŭs).

At last, divine Cecilia' came,
Inventress of the vocal frame :

The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheüs yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown :

He raised a mortal to the skies;

She drew an angel down.

DRYDEN. JOHN DRYDEN, one of the great masters of English verse, was born at Oldwinckle, in Northamptonshire, August, 1631. He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. He began his literary carcer by a set of heroic stanzas on the death of Cromwell, which was a good precursor of his future excellence. The Restoration occurring when he was in his thirtieth year, excluded him for the time from government employment and patronage, and he at once devoted himself to literature for a profession. The stage now offered itself as the only means through which his pen could furnish a livelihood; and, in the course of twenty-five years, he wrote twenty-seven dramas, the most remarkable of which are his "Heroic Plays." From these rhymed dialogues arose that mastery of the English heroic couplet which he was the first to acquire, and in which no succeeding poet has nearly equaled him. The prefaces, dedications, and essays, with which he accompanied his dramas, exhibit him at once as the earliest writer of regular and elegant English prose, and as the first who aimed in our language at any thing like philosophical criticism. These prose fragments contain some of the most felicitous specimens of style which our tongue has ever produced. His engagement to write plays for the King's Theater gave him £300 a year: his circumstances were improved by his marriage, in 1665, with Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire; and in 1670 he received, with a salary of £200 a year and the famous butt of wine, the joint offices of historiographer-royal and poet-laureate. "Absalom and Achitophel," the best of all his political satires, appeared in 1681. "The Medal" and "Mac Flecknoe," works of the same kind, followed soon after. In 1685, Dryden was received into the Church of Rome, the first public fruit of which was the "Hind and Panther," a rich allegorical poem, in which the main arguments of the Roman Church are stated. The Revolution, taking place in his fifty-seventh year, deprived the poet of his courtly patrons and pensions, and forced him to spend the last twelve years of his life in hard toil. Some of his best works were produced in this period. In 1690 appeared his tragedy of "Don Sebastian," the best of his serious plays. In 1697 he threw off at a heat his "Alexander's Feast," one of the most animated of all lyrical poems; and his spirited translation of Virgil appeared the same year. Lastly, in the spring of 1700, were published his "Fables," which prove that his warm imagination then burned as brightly

'Cecilia, the patron saint of music, erroneously regarded as the inventress of the organ, suffered martyrdom A. D. 220. She has been celebrated by several of the poets,

and depicted on canvas by more than one of the great painters. Raphael has most admirably presented her as the personification of heavenly devotion.

as ever, and that his metrical skill increased at the close of his life. These admirable poems shed a glory on the last days of the poet, who died on the 1st of May, 1700. For an extended description of Dryden's poetical endowments, the reader is referred to the 66th Exercise, p. 243.

2.

SECTION XXXIII.

I.

171. HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY.

T

10 be-or not to be that is the question!
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune;
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die-to sleep ;-
No more? and, by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die-to sleep :
To sleep! perchance to dream! Ay; there's the rub ;
For, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause!

There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con'tumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

3.

Who would fardels bear,
To groan and sweat under a weary life;
But that the dread of something after death,-
That undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns,-puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?