This, though not unexceptionable, and particularly in the last verse, has yet a tenderness and spirit utterly wanting in Mason.
What from my power would Sappho claim?
Who scorns thy flame?
What wayward boy
Disdains to yield thee joy for joy?
Soon shall he court the bliss he flies;
Soon beg the boon he now denies,
And, hastening back to love and thee,
Repay the wrong with extacy.
In the Pygmalion, a lyrical scene, he has made an effort equally vain, to represent the impassioned eloquence of Jean Jaques Rousseau.
In his shorter poems, there is too frequent a recurrence of the same machinery, and that, such as it needed but little invention to create. Either the poet himself, or some other person, is introduced, musing by a stream or lake, or in a forest, when the appearance of some celestial visitant, muse, spirit, or angel, suddenly awakens his attention.
Soft gleams of lustre tremble through the grove,
And sacred airs of minstrelsy divine
Are harp'd around, and flutt'ring pinions move.
Ah, hark! a voice, to which the vocal rill,
The lark's extatic harmony is rude;
Distant it swells with many a holy trill,
Now breaks wide warbling from yon orient cloud.
Elegy 2.
And,
But hark! methinks I hear her hallow'd tongue!
In distant trills it echoes o'er the tide;
Now meets mine ear with warbles wildly free,
As swells the lark's meridian extacy.
Ode vi.
After the extatic notes have been heard, all vanishes away like some figure in the clouds, which