Yet thou wilt love me more, when thou shalt find Thy absence written on my faded face.

Dearest, farewell!-tho' misery'now be ours,
Slow time will bring the re-uniting day,
When Thou, and Joy, shall bless these lonely bowers,
By sweet excess o'er-paying long delay!

ΤΟ

MISS MANSEL,

OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

PURE are the orient tints of early bloom, That o'er thy cheek, in soft suffusion, play; Bright are the streaming lustres, which illume The silent eloquence those eyes convey.

So pure, so bright, as opening life aspires,
Dear ISABELLA, be thy happy youth!

And may thy soul's hereditary fires

Guide thee indevious to the shrines of Truth,

And set thy pleasures on a scale so high,
That all which frolic Beauty's hope impels,
Insidious Flattery's betraying joy,

Intrigue's light page, and Dissipation's spells,

Shall meet seduceless the undazzled gaze,
That Nature's charms and Wisdom's page explores
Beneath pale moons while classic Camus strays,
And when red Morning blushes on his shores!

So shall thy heart, which mild Affection fills,
Be, when fierce Passion's fatal fervour glows,
Cold as the summit of Helvetian hills

When the sun strikes their unobeying snows.

Then borne o'er each vain wish and idle care,
By the mind's soaring and superior powers,
Thy painless sighs shall be as vernal air,
Thy tears as dews exhaling from the flowers,

ADDRESS

TO THE

YOUNG ROSCIUS. *

E'EN as the sun, beneath the Line, comes forth,
Where no prelusive glimmerings warn the night,
Strips her dense mantle from the sabled earth,
And pours himself at once in floods of light,

So on our eyes, young Day-Star, didst thou break, In dazzling effluence and resistless charm,

Ere in thy soul those passions could awake

That look'd, and breath'd, and lighten'd from thy form.

* Written after having seen him in five of his principal characters on the Lichfield Theatre, June 1807.

We saw them, at thy magic call, appear,
Tho' but till then to manhood only known;
Yes, ere upon thy head the thirteenth year
The violets of a primy Spring had strown.

In all Expression's subtlest shades they came
Thro' that Promethean glance, those varied tones,
Love, Jealousy, and Horror, Rage, and Shame,
Their hopes, their fears, their transports, and their
groans.

In thee, and in the scorn of gradual Art,
Genius her proudest miracle began;

Gave thee despotic empire o'er the heart,
Long years ere growth and strength might stamp thee

man.

Beneath the crown upon that infant brow,
The robe imperial on that fairy frame,

Stream'd all which grace and grandeur can bestow,
All which a monarch's dignity proclaim.

Thy Proteus soul each garb of feeling wore,
Fire in thine eye, and passion in thine air;
And still became thee, and in equal power,
Garlands of love, and laurel'd wreaths of war.