Talk of the flow’rs that round us bloom:
’Tis all a cloud, ’tis all a dream;
To love and joy thy thoughts confine,
Nor hope to pierce the sacred gloom.
Beauty has such resistless pow’r,
That ev’n the chaste Egyptian dame [[B]]
Sigh’d for the blooming Hebrew boy:
For her how fatal was the hour,
When to the banks of Nilus came
[[C]] A youth so lovely and so coy!