"For cliff-top'd mountains, and aerial towers?"
He said; and, leading from her ivory seat
The blushing Beauty to his lone retreat,
255 Curtain'd with night the couch imperial shrouds,
And rests the crimson cushions upon clouds.--
Earth feels the grateful influence from above,
Sighs the soft Air, and Ocean murmurs love;
Etherial Warmth expands his brooding wing,
260 And in still showers descends the genial Spring.


[_And steer'd by love_. l. 222. The younger love, or Cupid, the son of
Venus, owes his existence and his attributes to much later times than
the Eros, or divine love, mentioned in Canto I. since the former is no
where mentioned by Homer, though so many apt opportunities of
introducing him occur in the works of that immortal bard. Bacon.]

[_And in still showers._ l. 260. The allegorical interpretation of the
very antient mythology which supposes Jupiter to represent the superior
part of the atmosphere or ether, and Juno the inferior air, and that the
conjunction of these two produces vernal showers, as alluded to in
Virgil's Georgics, is so analogous to the present important discovery of
the production of water from pure air, or oxygene, and inflammable air,
or hydrogene, (which from its greater levity probably resides over the
former,) that one should be tempted to believe that the very antient
chemists of Egypt had discovered the composition of water, and thus
represented it in their hieroglyphic figures before the invention of
letters.

In the passage of Virgil Jupiter is called ether, and descends in