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Were none put brutes to call that soil their home,
Whate.none but demi-gods should dare to roam?
Or, worse, thou mighty world! oh! doubly worse,
Did Heaven design thy lordly land to nurse
The motley dregs of every distant clime,
Each blast of anarchy and taint of crime
Which Europe shakes from her perturbed sphere,
In full malignity to rankle here?

But hush!-observe that little mount of pines,
Where the breeze murmurs and the fire-fly shines,
There let thy fancy raise, in bold relief,
The sculptured image of that veteran chief, '
Who lost the rebel's in the hero's name,
And stepp'd o'er prostrate loyalty to fame;
Beneath whose sword Columbia's patriot train

Cast off their monarch, that their mob might reign!

How shall we rank thee upon Glory's page?
Thou more than soldier and just less than sage!
Too form'd for peace to act a conqueror's part,
Too train'd in camps to learn a statesman's art,
Nature design'd thee for a hero's mould,
But, ere she cast thee, let the stuff grow cold!

While warmer souls command, nay, make their fate,
Thy fate made thee and forced thee to be great.
Yet Fortune, who so oft, so blindly sheds
Her brightest halo round the weakest heads,
Found thee undazzled, tranquil as before,
Proud to be useful, scorning to be more;
Less prompt at glory's than at duty's claim,-
Renown the meed, but self-applause the aim;
All thou hast been reflects less fame on thee,
Far less, than all thou hast forborne to be!

Now turn thine eye where faint the moonlight falls
On yonder dome-and in those princely halls,
If thou canst hate, as, oh! that soul must hate,
Which loves the virtuous and reveres the great,
If thou canst loathe and execrate with me
That Gallic garbage of philosophy,
That nauseous slaver of these frantic times,
With which false liberty dilutes her crimes!
If thou hast got, within thy free-born breast,
One pulse that beats more proudly than the rest,
With honest scorn for that inglorious soul
Which creeps and winds, beneath a mob's control,
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod,
And makes, like Egypt, every beast its god!
There, in those walls—but, burning tongue, forbear!
Rank must be reverenced, even the rank that's there :
So here I pause-and now, my Hume! we part;
But oh! full oft in magic dreams of heart,
Thus let us meet, and mingle converse dear
By Thames at home, or by Potowmac here!

O'er lake and marsh, through fevers and through fogs,
Midst bears and yankees, democrats and frogs,
Thy foot shall follow me, thy heart and eyes
With me shall wonder, and with me despise! a

On a small hill near the capitol, there is to be an equestrian statue of General Washington.

In the ferment which the French revolution excited among the democrats of America, and the licentious sympathy with which they shared in the wildest excesses of jacobinism, we may find one source of that vulgarity of vice, that hostility to all the graces of life, which distinguishes the present demagogues of the United States, and bas

While I, as oft, in witching thought shall rove
To thee, to friendship, and that land I love,
Where, like the air that fans her fields of green,
Her freedom spreads, unfever'd and serene;
Where sovereign man can condescend to see
The throne and laws more sovereign still than he!

THE SNAKE. 1801.

My love and I, the other day, Within a myrtle arbour lay, When near us from a rosy bed,

A little snake put forth its head.

«See,» said the maid, with laughing eyes—

<< Yonder the fatal emblem lies!
Who could expect such hidden harm
Beneath the rose's velvet charm?»>

Never did moral thought occur

In more unlucky hour than this; For oh! I just was leading her,

To talk of love and think of bliss.

I rose to kill the snake, but she In pity pray'd, it might not be.

«No,» said the girl-and many a spark Flash'd from her eyelid, as she said it

<< Under the rose, or in the dark, One might, perhaps, have cause to dread it; But when its wicked eyes appear,

And when we know for what they wink so, One must be very simple, dear,

To let it sting one-don't you think so?»>

LINES,

WRITTEN ON LEAVING PHILADELPHIA.

τηνδε την πολιν φίλως

Ειπων επαξια γαρ.

SOPHOCL. OEdip. Colon. v. 758.

ALONE by the Schuylkill a wanderer roved,
And bright were its flowery banks to his eye;
But far, very far were the friends that he loved,

And he gazed on its flowery banks with a sigh!

Oh Nature! though blessed and bright are thy rays,
O'er the brow of creation enchantingly thrown,
Yet faint are they all to the lustre that plays

In a smile from the heart that is dearly our own! become indeed too generally the characteristic of their countrymen. -But there is another cause of the corruption of private morals, which, encouraged as it is by the government, and identified with the interests of the community, seems to threaten the decay of all honest principle in America. I allude to those fraudulent violations of neutrality to which they are indebted for the most lucrative part of their commerce, and by which they have so long infringed and counteracted the maritime rights and advantages of this country. This unwarrantable trade is necessarily abetted by such a system of collusion, imposture, and perjury, as caunot fail to spread rapid contamination around it.

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With a bright meteor-braid,

Which, like an ever-springing wreath of vine,
Shot into brilliant leafy shapes,
And o'er his brow in lambent tendrils play'd!
While 'mid the foliage hung,
Like lucid grapes,

A thousand clustering blooms of light,
Cull'd from the gardens of the galaxy!
Upon his bosom Cytherea's head

When at home he shall talk of the toil he has known, Lay lovely, as when first the Syrens sung

To tell, with a sigh, what endearments he met,

As he stray'd by the wave of the Schuylkill alone!

THE FALL OF HEBE.

A DYTHYRAMBIC ODE.I

'T WAS on a day

When the immortals at their banquet lay;

Though I call this a Dithyrambic Ode, I cannot presume to say that it possesses, in any degree, the characteristics of that species of poetry. The nature of the ancient Dithyrambic is very imperfectly known. According to M. BURETTE, a licentious irregularity of metre, an extravagant research of thought and expression, and a rude embarrassed construction, are among its most distinguishing features. He adds, Ces caractères des dityrambes se font sentir à ceux qui lisent attentivement les Odes de Pindare.-Mémoires de l'Acad. vol. x. p. 306. And the same opinion may be collected from SCHMIDT'S Dissertation upon the subject. But I think, if the Dithyrambics of Pindar were in our possession, we should find that, however wild and fanciful, they were by no means the tasteless jargon they are represented, and that even their irregularity was what BOILEAU calls un beau désordre. CHIABRERA, who has been styled the Pindar of Italy, and from whom all its poetry upon the Greek model was called Chiabreresco (as CRESCIMBENI informs us, lib. i, cap. 12) has given, amongst his Vendemmie, a Ditbyrambic, all' uso de' Greci: it is full of those compound epithets which, we are told, were a chief character of the style (συνθέτους δε λέξεις εποιουν. SUID. Διθυραμβοδιδ.); such as

Briglindorato Pegaso Nubicalpestator.

But I cannot suppose that Pindar, even amidst all the license of dithyrambics, would ever have descended to ballad-language like the following:

Bella Filli, e bella Clori

Non più dar pregio a tue bellezze e taci,

Che se Bacco fa vezzi alle mie labbra

Fo le fiche a' vostri baci.

esser vorrei Coppier,

E se troppo desiro

Deh fossi lo Bottiglier.

Rime del CHIABRERA, part. ii, p. 352.

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This is a Platonic fancy; the philosopher supposes, in his Tmæus that, when the Deity had formed the soul of the world, he proceeded to the composition of other souls; in which process, says PLATO, he made use of the same cup, though the ingredients he mingled were not quite so pure as for the former; and having refined the mixture with a little of his own essence, he distributed it among the stars, which served as reservoirs of the fluid. Taut' ELTE

και παλιν επί τον πρότερον κρατήρα εν ώ την του παντος ψυχην κεραννύς έμισγε, κ. τ. λ.

a We learn from THEOPHRASTUS, that the roses of Cyrene were particularly fragrant. Ευοσμοτατα τα δε τα εν Κυρήνη ρόδα.

Of dimpled Hebe, as she wing'd her feet

Up

The empyreal mount,

To drain the soul-drops at their stellar fount; ' And still,

As the resplendent rill

Flamed o'er the goblet with a mantling heat,

Her graceful care

Would cool its heavenly fire

In gelid waves of snowy-feather'd air,

Such as the children of the pole respire,

In those enchanted lands

Where life is all a spring and north winds never blow!

But oh!

Sweet Hebe, what a tear

And what a blush were thine,

When, as the breath of every Grace
Wafted thy fleet career

Along the studded sphere,

With a rich cup for Jove himself to drink,
Some star, that glitter'd in the way,
Raising its amorous head
To kiss so exquisite a tread,
Check'd thy impatient pace!
And all Heaven's host of eyes
Saw those luxuriant beauties sink
In lapse of loveliness, along the azure skies! 3
Upon whose starry plain they lay,
Like a young blossom on our meads of gold,
Shed from a vernal thorn

Amid the liquid sparkles of the morn!
Or, as in temples of the Paphian shade,
The myrtled votaries of the queen behold
An image of their rosy idol, laid

Upon a diamond shrine!

The wanton wind,

Which had pursued the flying fair,

And sweetly twined

Its spirit with the breathing rings

Of her ambrosial hair,

Soar'd as she fell, and on its ruffling wings

(Oh wanton wind!)

Heraclitus (Physicus) held the soul to be a spark of the stellar essence: Scintilla stellaris essentia.-MACROBIUS, in Somn. Scip. lib. i, cap. 14.

The country of the Hyperboreans; they were supposed to be placed so far north that the north wind could not affect them ;— they lived longer than any other mortals; passed their whole time in music and dancing, etc. etc. But the most extravagant fiction related of them is that to which the two lines preceding allude. It was imagined that instead of our vulgar atmosphere, the Hyperboreans breathed nothing but feathers! According to HERODOTUS and PLINY, this idea was suggested by the quantity of snow which was observed to fall in those regions; thus the former, Tz wy птερа еixαζοντας την χιονα τους Σκύθας τε και τους περιοίκους δοκέω λεγειν.—HERODOT. lib. iv, cap. 31. Orio tells the fable

otherwise see Metamorph. lib. xv.

Mr O'Halloran, and some other Irish Antiquarians, have been at great expense of learning to prove that the strange country, where they took snow for feathers, was Ireland, and that the famous Abaris was an Irish Druid. Mr Rowland, however, will have it, that Abaris was a Welshman, and that his name is only a corruption of Ap Rees! 3 I believe it is SERVIUS who mentions this unlucky trip which Hebe made in her occupation of cup-bearer; and HOFFMAN tells it after him: Cum Hebe pocula Jovi administrans, perque lubricum minus caute incedens, cecidisset, revolutisque vestibus in short, she fell in a very awkward manner, and though (as the Encyclopéd istes think) it would have amused Jove at any other time, yet, as he happened to be out of temper on that day, the poor girl was dismissed from her employment.

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Fell glowing through the spheres,
While all around, new tints of bliss,
New perfumes of delight,
Enrich'd its radiant flow!

Now, with a humid kiss,
It thrill'd along the beamy wire

Of heaven's illumined lyre, 3
Stealing the soul of music in its flight!
And now, amid the breezes bland

That whisper from the planets as they roll,
The bright libation, softly fann'd
By all their sighs, meandering stole!
They who, from Atlas' height,
Beheld the rill of flame

Descending through the waste of night,
Thought 't was a planet whose stupendous frame
Had kindled as it rapidly revolved
Around its fervid axle, and dissolved
Into a flood so bright!

The child of day,

Within his twilight bower,

Lay sweetly sleeping

On the flush'd bosom of a lotos-flower; 4

The arcane symbols of this ceremony were deposited in the cista, where they lay religiously concealed from the eyes of the profane. They were generally carried in the procession by an ass; and hence portat mysteria.-See the Divine Legation, book ii, sect. 4. the proverb, which one may so often apply in the world, asinus

In the Geoponica, lib. ii, cap. 17, there is a fable somewhat like this descent of the nectar to earth. Εν ουρανῳ των θεών εντ χουμένων, και του νεκταρος πολλού παρακειμένου, ανασκιρτηται χορεια τον Έρωτα και σύσσεισαι τῷ πτέρω του κρατήρος την βασιν, και περιτρέψαι μεν αυτόν το δε νεκταρ εις την γην εκχυθέν, κ. τ. λ.

See Autor, de Re Rust, edit. Cantab. 1704.

3 The constellation Lyra. The astrologers attribute great virtues to this sign in ascendenti, which are enumerated by PONTANO, in his Urania:

----Ecce novem cum pectine chordas
Emodulans, mulcetque novo vaga sidera cantu,
Quo captæ nascentum animæ concordia ducunt
Pectora, etc.

4 The Egyptians represented the dawn of day by a young boy seated upon a lotos. Είτε Αιγυπτους έωρακως αρχήν ανατολής παιδιου νεογνού γράφοντας επί λωτῳ κατ

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CoμEVO. PLUTARCH. περί του μη χραν εμμετρ See also his treatise de Isid. et Osir. Observing that the lotos showed its head above water at sun-rise, and sank again at his setting, they conceived the idea of consecrating it to Osiris, or the sun.

This symbol of a youth sitting upon a fotos, is very frequent on the Abraxases, or Basilidian stones.-See MONTFAUCON, tom. ii, planche 158, and the Supplément, etc. tom. ii, lib. vii, chap. 5.

The ancients esteemed those flowers and trees the sweetest upon which the rainbow had appeared to rest: and the wood they chiefly burned in sacritices, was that which the smile of Iris had consecrated. -PLUTARCH. Sympos. lib. iv, cap. 2, where (as Vossius remark.) xatovat, instead of xzhoust, is undoubtedly the genuine readin -See Vossics for some curious particularities of the rainbow, De Ori gin. et Progress. Idololat, lib. iii, cap. 13.

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No, no, be happy-dry that tear-
Though some thy heart hath harbour'd near
May now repay its love with blame;
Though man, who ought to shield thy fame,
Ungenerous man, be first to wound thee;

Though the whole world may freeze around thee,
Oh! thou 'It be like that lucid tear1

Which, bright, within the crystal's sphere

In liquid purity was found,

Though all had grown congeal'd around;
Floating in frost, it mock'd the chill,
Was

pure, I was soft, was brilliant still!

1 This alludes to a curious gem, upon which Claudian has left us some pointless epigrams. It was a drop of pure water inclosed within a piece of crystal.-See CLAUDIAN. Epigram. de Chrystallo cui aqua inerat. ADDISON mentions a curiosity of this kind at Milan; he also says, It is such a rarity as this that I saw at Vendôme in France, which they there pretend is a tear that our Saviour shed over Lazarus, and was gathered up by an angel, who put it in a little crystal vial and made a present of it to Mary Magdalen.-ADDISON'S Remarks on several Parts of Italy.

HYMN OF A VIRGIN OF DELPHI,

AT THE TOMB OF HER MOTHER.

On! lost, for ever lost!-no more
Shall Vesper light our dewy way
Along the rocks of Crissa's shore,

To hymn the fading fires of day!
No more to Tempé's distant vale

In holy musings shall we roam, Through summer's glow and winter's gale, To bear the mystic chaplets home! 'T was then my soul's expanding zeal, By Nature warm'd and led by thee, In every breeze was taught to feel

The breathings of a deity!

Guide of my heart! to memory true,

Thy looks, thy words, are still my ownI see thee raising from the dew

Some laurel, by the wind o'erthrown,
And hear thee say,This bumble bough
Was planted for a doom divine,
And, though it weep in languor now,

Shall flourish on the Delphic shrine!
Thus in the vale of earthly sense,

Though sunk awhile the spirit lies, A viewless hand shall cull it thence, To bloom immortal in the skies!»

Thy words had such a melting flow,

And spoke of truth so sweetly well, They dropp'd like heaven's serenest snow, And all was brightness where they fell. Fond soother of my infant tear!

Fond sharer of my infant joy!
Is not thy shade still lingering here?
Am I not still thy soul's employ?
And oh! as oft at close of day,

When meeting on the sacred mount,
Our nymphs awaked the choral lay,

And danced around Cassotis' fount; As then, 't was all thy wish and care That mine should be the simplest mien, My lyre and voice the sweetest there,

My foot the lightest o'er the green; So still, each little grace to mould, Around my form thine eyes are shed, Arranging every snowy fold,

tread!

And guiding every mazy
And, when I lead the hymning choir,
Thy spirit still, unseen and free,
Hovers between my lip and lyre,
And weds them into harmony!

Flow, Plistus, flow! thy murmuring wave

Shall never drop its silvery tear

Upon so pure, so blest a grave,
To memory so divinely dear!

'The laurel, for the common uses of the temple, for adorning the altars and sweeping the pavement, was supplied by a tree near the fountain of Castalia: but upon all important occasions, they sent to Tempe for their laurel. We find in PAUSANIAS, that this valley supplied the branches of which the temple was originally constructed; and PLUTARCH says, in his Dialogue on Music, The youth who brings the Tempic laurel toDelphi is always attended by a player on the flute,

Αλλα μην και την κατακομίζοντι παιδί την Τεμπικήν δαφνην εις Δελφους παρομαρτει αυλητης.

RINGS AND SEALS.

Ώσπερ σφραγιδες τα φιλήματα.
ACHILLES TATIUS, lib. ii.

Go!" said the angry, weeping maid, The charm is broken!-once betray'd, Oh! never can my heart rely

On word or look, on oath or sigh.
Take back the gifts, so sweetly given,
With promised faith and vows to Heaven;
That little ring which, night and morn,
With wedded truth my hand hath worn;
That seal which oft, in moments blest,
Thou hast upon my lip imprest,
And sworn its dewy spring should be
A fountain seal'd' for only thee!
Take, take them back, the gift and vow,
All sullied, lost, and hateful now!

I took the ring-the scal I took,
While, oh! her every tear and look
Were such as angels look and shed,
When man is by the world misled!
Gently I whisper'd, Fanny, dear!
Not half thy lover's gifts are here:
Say, where are all the seals he gave
To every ringlet's jetty wave,
And where is every one he printed
Upon that lip so ruby-tinted-
Scals of the purest gem of bliss,
Oh! richer, softer far than this!

And then the ring-my love! recal How many rings, delicious all, His arms around that neck have twisted, Twining warmer far than this did! Where are they all, so sweet, so many? Oh! dearest, give back all, if any!

While thus I murmur'd, trembling too
Lest all the nymph had vow'd was true,

I saw a smile relenting rise
'Mid the moist azure of her eyes,
Like day-light o'er a sea of blue
While yet the air is dim with dew!
She let her cheek repose on mine,
She let my arms around her twine—
Oh! who can tell the bliss one feels
In thus exchanging rings and seals!

TO MISS SUSAN B--CKF——D.

I MORE than once have heard, at night,
A
song like those thy lips have given,
And it was sung by shapes of light,

Who seem'd, like thee, to breathe of Heaven!

There are gardens, supposed to be those of King Solomon, in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem. The friars show a fountain, which

they say is the sealed fountain' to which the holy spouse in the Can

ticles is compared and they pretend a tradition, that Solomon shut up these springs and put his signet upon the door, to keep them

τor his own drinking MANDELL's Travels. See also the Notes 10 Mr Good's Translation of the Song of Solomon.

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