From “Tyrannic Love,” Act IV. Sc. 1.
AH, how sweet it is to love!
Ah, how gay is young desire!
And what pleasing pains we prove
When we first approach love’s fire!
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
Sighs which are from lovers blown
Do but gently heave the heart:
E’en the tears they shed...
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise, ye more than dead!
Then cold and hot, and moist and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music’...
An Ode
’T WAS at the royal feast, for Persia won
By Philip’s warlike son:
Aloft in awful state
The godlike hero sate
On his imperial throne:
His valiant peers were placed around,
Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound
(So should desert in arms be crowned);
The lovely Thais,...
Prefixed to “Paradise Lost”
THREE Poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.
