Page:Life of Edmond Malone.djvu/485

V.
At this, slow raising up his thoughtful head,
      The youth, pathetic, said:
“What now, alas! avails my royal state?
Hard is my lot, and, oh! severe my fate.
Contending passions now distract my breast:
Is this the boasted fruit of being great,
      The loss of peace and rest?
    My raptured mind now Fancy sways,
    And all my soul her voice obeys.
Now Reason cries, ‘Attend my sober strain.’
Cruel conditions! whichsoe’er I choose,
      The want of that which I refuse
Will quite corrode what I retain,
And late, perhaps, I shall repent in vain.”

VI.
“Not so, my best beloved, my favoured youth”
    (Here interrupted Wisdom’s queen),
“For such thy goodness and thy worth has been,
      Thy virtue, innocence, and truth,
      That thou deserv’st a nobler fate;
Nor e’er shalt thou, my son, too late
      Thy conduct past repent;
    If beauty of the brightest dye,
      If every graceful art
      That can attract the heart,
    Or charm the lover’s nicer eye,
      Can give thy soul content.
For lo! to thee I now assign
Charlotte, the favourite of the Nine,
      Nor less beloved by me;
      Her do I now bestow on thee.
    Nor can the Queen of Love refuse
      To join thy royal hand,
      In the connubial band,
    With this sweet daughter of the Muse;
    Since even from her earliest year,
    She still has been her darling care.”
This said, they instant vanished from his sight,
And soon were lost in shades of endless night.

VII.
Smooth glide my verse, my numbers gently flow,
Nor harshly quick, nor querulously slow.
For see! where hoary Thames’ translucent stream,
    His rushy-fringèd bank in silence laves,
        And all his crystal waves