The strength and beauty that its waves impart.
Here THETIS, bending, with a mother's fears
Dips her dear boy, whose pride restrains his tears.
There, VENUS, rising, shrinks with sweet surprize,
As her fair self reflected seems to rise!
Far from the joyless glare, the maddening strife,
And all 'the dull impertinence of life,'
These eyelids open to the rising ray,
And close, when Nature bids, at close of day.
Here, at the dawn, the kindling landscape glows;
There noon-day levees call from faint repose.
Here the flush'd wave flings back the parting light;
There glimmering lamps anticipate the night.
When from his classic dreams the student steals, [Footnote 3]
Amid the buzz of crowds, the whirl of wheels,
To muse unnotic'd--while around him press
The meteor-forms of equipage and dress;
Alone, in wonder lost, he seems to stand
A very stranger in his native land!
And (tho' perchance of current coin possest,
And modern phrase by living lips exprest)
Like those blest Youths, forgive the fabling page, [k]
Whose blameless lives deceiv'd a twilight age,
Spent in sweet slumbers; till the miner's spade
Unclos'd the cavern, and the morning play'd.
Ah, what their strange surprize, their wild delight!
New arts of life, new manners meet their sight!
In a new world they wake, as from the dead;
Yet doubt the trance dissolv'd, the vision fled!
O come, and, rich in intellectual wealth,