Shall then sich maids unpitied moane?
They might as well, like her, be stone,
As thus forsaken dwell.
Since Glaston now can boast no clerks;
Come down from Oxenford, ye sparks,65
And, oh! revoke the spell.
Yet stay—nor thus despond, ye fair;
Virtue's the gods' peculiar care;
I hear the gracious voice:
Your sex shall soon be blest agen,70
We only wait to find sich men,
As best deserve your choice.
XV.
BRYAN AND PEREENE,
A West Indian Ballad,
Is founded on a real fact, that happened in the island of St. Christophers about the beginning of the present reign. The Editor owes the following stanzas to the friendship of Dr. James Grainger[1025] who was an eminent physician in that island when this tragical incident happened, and died there much honoured and lamented in 1767. To this ingenious gentleman the public are indebted for the fine Ode on Solitude, printed in the fourth vol. of Dodsley's Miscel. p. 229, in which are assembled some of the sublimest images in nature. The reader will pardon the insertion of the first stanza here, for the sake of rectifying the two last lines, which were thus given by the author:
"O Solitude, romantic maid,
Whether by nodding towers you tread,
Or haunt the desart's trackless gloom,
Or hover o'er the yawning tomb,
Or climb the Andes' clifted side,
Or by the Nile's coy source abide,
Or starting from your half-year's sleep
From Hecla view the thawing deep,
Or at the purple dawn of day
Tadmor's marble wastes survey," &c.
alluding to the account of Palmyra published by some late ingenious travellers, and the manner in which they were struck at the first sight of those magnificent ruins by break of day.[1026]