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One would think she might like to retire
To the bower I have laboured to rear ;
Not a shrub that I heard her admire,

But I hasted and planted it there.
O how sudden the jessamine strove
With the lilac to render it gay!
Already it calls for my love

To prune the wild branches away.

From the plains, from the woodlands, and groves,
What strains of wild melody flow,

How the nightingales warble their loves
From thickets of roses that blow !
And when her bright form shall appear,
Each bird shall harmoniously join.
For a concert so soft and so clear,

As she may not be fond to resign.

I have found out a gift for my fair,

I have found where the wood-pigeons breed; But let me that plunder forbear,

She will say 'twas a barbarous deed,
For he ne'er could be true, she averred,
Who could rob a poor bird of his young;
And I loved her the more when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue.

I have heard her with sweetness unfold
How that pity was due to a dove;
That it ever attended the bold,

And she called it the sister of Love.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore,
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I should love her the more.

Can a bosom so gentle remain

Unmoved when her Corydon sighs? Will a nymph that is fond of the plain These plains and this valley despise ?

Dear regions of silence and shade!

Soft scenes of contentment and ease!
Where I could have pleasingly strayed,

If aught in her absence could please.
But where does my Phyllida stray?

And where are her grots and her bowers?
Are the groves and the valleys as gay,
And the shepherds as gentle as ours?
The groves may perhaps be as fair,

And the face of the valleys as fine;
The swains may in manners compare,
But their love is not equal to mine.

ODE TO EVENING.

BY WILLIAM COLLINS.-1720-56.

[WILLIAM COLLINS, the son of a respectable tradesman, a hatter in Chichester, was born on Christmas Day, 1720. Through the assistance of his uncle, he received a college education at Oxford. He quitted that seat of learning for London in 1744, with high hopes and magnificent schemes. In 1746, he published his "Odes" and "Eclogues," but their success did not realize his sanguine expectations; and he suffered not only from disappointment, but from poverty even beyond the lot of poets. He was raised temporarily from his abject condition by a legacy of 2,000l. from his uncle; but he never recovered his spirits, and after a short time sank into a state of hopeless imbecility. He died in the year 1756, at the early age of thirty-six. His Odes, of which the most celebrated are that to "Evening" and on the "Passions," are, without doubt, among the first productions of British Poetry.]

Fought of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

IF

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear
Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs, and dying gales;

O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent whose cloudy skirts,

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

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Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With soft shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum:
Now teach me, maid composed,

To breathe some softened strain,

Whose numbers stealing through thy dark'ning vale,
May not unseemly with its stillness suit;

As, musing slow, I hail

Thy genial loved return!

For when thy folding-star arising shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp
The fragrant hours, and elves
Who slept in buds the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge,
And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and, lovelier still
The pensive pleasures sweet,

Prepare thy shadowy car;

Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene;
Or find some ruin, 'midst its dreary dells,
Whose walls more awful nod

By thy religious gleams.

Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain,
Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain's side
Views wild and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim discovered spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

While spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont,
And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!
While summer loves to sport
Beneath thy lingering light;

While sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves;
Or winter, yelling through the troublous air,
Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes;

So long regardful of thy quiet rule,
Shall fancy, friendship, science, smiling peace,
Thy gentlest influence own,

And love thy favourite name.

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[THOMAS GRAY, the son of a scrivener, was born in London in 1716; he was educated at Eton, and afterwards at Cambridge, where his life was chiefly spent in his favourite studies. In 1739 he was induced by his friend Horace Walpole to join him in a Continental tour; they had some slight quarrel, and Gray returned, in the year 1741. He planned many literary schemes, but lacked the energy to bring them to a completion. In 1747 he published his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," and in 1751 his well-known "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," possibly the noblest elegy in the language; of the appreciation of this by men under the most exigent circumstances, Lord Stanhope, in his History, gives a

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