Love, joy, and harmony, and peace, were there—
God saw his glorious work, and it was good.
These lines are cited, because they are the only good ones in the poem, and because it occurs to us that we have seen something rather like them in the works of a respectable poet of the middle ages—one Milton. In the remainder of the effusion, Mrs. Ware is unquestionably original.
Brief hour of human purity and truth!
Malignant Envy, in the bland disguise
Of friendship, stole, yea, twined his serpent folds
Around fair Wisdom’s consecrated Tree.
“Eat, woman, eat—ye shall not surely die!”
Thus spake the tempter of mankind. They ate—
A sudden darkness gathered o’er the sky.