The brow of Juno flushed—
Love blest the breeze!
The Muses blushed;
And every cheek was hid behind a lyre,
While every eye looked laughing through the strings.
But the bright cup? the nectared draught
Which Jove himself was to have quaffed?
Alas, alas, upturned it lay
By the fallen Hebe's side;
While, in slow lingering drops, the ethereal tide,
As conscious of its own rich essence, ebbed away.
Who was the Spirit that remembered Man,
In that blest hour,
And, with a wing of love,
Brushed off the goblet's scattered tears,
As, trembling near the edge of heaven they ran,
And sent them floating to our orb below?
Essence of immortality!
The shower
Fell glowing through the spheres;
While all around new tints of bliss,
New odors and new light,
Enriched its radiant flow.
Now, with a liquid kiss,
It stole along the thrilling wire
Of Heaven's luminous Lyre,
Stealing the soul of music in its flight:
And now, amid the breezes bland,
That whisper from the planets as they roll,
The bright libation, softly fanned
By all their sighs, meandering stole.
They who, from Atlas' height,
Beheld this rosy flame
Descending through the waste of night,
Thought 'twas some planet, whose empyreal frame
Had kindled, as it rapidly revolved
Around its fervid axle, and dissolved
Into a flood so bright!
The youthful Day,
Within his twilight bower,
Lay sweetly sleeping
On the flushed bosom of a lotos-flower;[4]
When round him, in profusion weeping,
Dropt the celestial shower,
Steeping
The rosy clouds, that curled
About his infant head,
Like myrrh upon the locks of Cupid shed.
But, when the waking boy
Waved his exhaling tresses through the sky,
O morn of joy!
The tide divine,
All glorious with the vermil dye
It drank beneath his orient eye,
Distilled, in dews, upon the world,
And every drop was wine, was heavenly WINE!
Blest be the sod, and blest the flower
On which descended first that shower,
All fresh from Jove's nectareous springs;—
Oh far less sweet the flower, the sod,
O'er which the Spirit of the Rainbow flings
The magic mantle of her solar God![5]
[1] We learn from Theopbrastus, that the roses of Cyrene were particularly fragrant.
[2] Heraclitus (Physicus) held the soul to be a spark of the stellar essence.
[3] The country of the Hyperboreans. These people were supposed to be placed so far north that the north wind could not affect them; they lived longer than any other mortals; passed their whole time in music and dancing, etc.
[4] The Egyptians represented the dawn of day by a young boy seated upon a lotos. Observing that the lotos showed its head above water at sunrise, and sank again at his setting, they conceived the idea of consecrating this flower to Osiris, or the sun.
[5] The ancients esteemed those flowers and trees the sweetest upon which the rainbow had appeared to rest; and the wood they chiefly burned in sacrifices, was that which the smile of Iris had consecrated.
RINGS AND SEALS.
"Go!" said the angry, weeping maid,
"The charm is broken!—once betrayed,
"Never can this wronged heart rely
"On word or look, on oath or sigh.
"Take back the gifts, so fondly given,
"With promised faith and vows to heaven;
"That little ring which, night and morn,
"With wedded truth my hand hath worn;
"That seal which oft, in moments blest,
"Thou hast upon my lip imprest,
"And sworn its sacred spring should be
"A fountain sealed[1] for only thee:
"Take, take them back, the gift and vow,
"All sullied, lost and hateful now!"