My soul is free as ambient air,

Although my baser part 's immew'd,
Whilst loyal thoughts do still repair

To accompany my solitude:
Although rebellion do my body binde,
My king alone can captivate my minde.

Attributed to L'ESTRANGE.

75

DEATH'S FINAL CONQUEST.

THE glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things:

There is no armour against fate:
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill,
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late

They stoop to fate,

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And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.

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The garlands wither on your brow,

Then boast no more your mighty deeds:

Upon Death's purple altar now

See, where the victor-victim bleeds!

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All heads must come

To the cold tomb:

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.

SHIRLEY.

CONTENT.

THIS only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.

Some honour I would have,
Not from great deeds, but good alone;
The unknown are better than ill known;
Rumour can ope the grave;

Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturb'd as death, the night.
My house a cottage more

Than palace, and should fitting be
For all my use, no luxury.

My garden painted o'er

With Nature's hand, not Art's; can pleasures yield,

Horace might envy in his Sabine field.

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Thus would I double my life's fading space;

For he that runs it well, twice runs his race.

And in this true delight,

These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear, nor wish my fate:

But boldly say each night,

To-morrow let my sun his beams display,

Or in clouds hide them; I have lived to-day.

COWLEY.

T

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THE DIRGE.

WHAT is the existence of man's life
But open war or slumber'd strife;
Where sickness to his sense presents
The combat of the elements,

And never feels a perfect peace

Till death's cold hand signs his release ?

It is a storm-where the hot blood
Outvies in rage the boiling flood;
And each loud passion of the mind

Is like a furious gust of wind,

Which beats the bark with many a wave,
Till he casts anchor in the grave.

It is a flower-which buds and grows,
And withers as the leaves disclose;

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Whose spring and fall faint seasons keep, 15
Like fits of waking before sleep,
Then shrinks into that fatal mould
Where its first being was enroll'd.

It is a dream-whose seeming truth
Is moralized in age and youth:
Where all the comforts he can share
As wandering as his fancies are;
Till in a mist of dark decay
The dreamer vanish quite away.
It is a dial-which points out
The sunset as it moves about;
And shadows out in lines of night
The subtle stages of Time's flight.

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Till all-obscuring earth hath laid
His body in perpetual shade.

It is a weary interlude—

Which doth short joys, long woes, include:
The world the stage, the prologue tears;

The acts vain hopes and varied fears:
The scene shuts up with loss of breath,
And leaves no epilogue but Death!

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KING.

ATHENS.

Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
Westward, much nearer by south-west, behold;
Where on the Ægean shore a city stands,
Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil:
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

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City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
See there the olive grove of Academe,

Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird

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Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;

There flowery hill Hymettus, with the sound

Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites

To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls

His whispering stream: within the walls then view 15 The schools of ancient sages; his, who bred

Great Alexander to subdue the world,

Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next:

There shalt thou hear and learn the secret power
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit

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By voice or hand; and various-measured verse,
Æolian charms and Dorian lyric odes,

And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer call'd,
Whose poem Phœbus challenged for his own:
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing:
Thence to the famous orators repair,

Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democratie,

Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne.

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MILTON.

EXTRACT FROM LYCIDAS.

RETURN, Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks;
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

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