III. THE PICTURE OF THE BODY. ITTING, and ready to be drawn, What make these velvets, silks, and lawn, Send these suspected helps to aid Draw first a cloud, all save her neck, Then let the beams of that disperse The heaven design'd, draw next a spring, 2 Four rivers branching forth, like seas, And Paradise confining these.] That could never be the case : the land may be confined by the rivers, though not these by the land. And this the sacred historian tells us was the situation of Paradise; for confining, therefore, we must read, confin'd in these. WHAL. Whalley has prayed his pible ill, and the poet is a better scrip Last, draw the circles of this globe, IV. THE PICTURE OF THE MIND. AINTER, you're come, but may be No, to express this mind to sense, tural geographer than the priest. The river that watered Paradise, branched into four heads immediately upon quitting it. Paradise therefore, was not inclosed by the four rivers; it merely touched them. Could my predecessor be ignorant that the primitive sense of confine, was to border upon? 3 or soundless pit,] i. e. bottomless, that cannot be fathomed. WHAL. Sweet Mind, then speak yourself, and say, I call you, Muse, now make it true : A mind so pure, so perfect fine, There, high exalted in the sphere, It moveth all; and makes a flight Whose notions when it will express The voice so sweet, the words so fair, As some soft chime had stroked the air; But that a mind so rapt, so high, Earth's grossness; there's the how and why. Is it because it sees us dull, And sunk in clay here, it would pull Or hath she here, upon the ground, Thrice happy house, that hast receipt Not swelling like the ocean proud, Smooth, soft, and sweet, in all a flood, In action, winged as the wind; In thee, fair mansion, let it rest, Yet know, with what thou art possest, But such a mind, mak'st God thy guest.* [A whole quaternion in the midst of this poem is lost, containing entirely the three next pieces of it, and all of the fourth (which in the order of the whole is the eighth) excepting the very end: which at the top of the next quaternion goeth on thus.] 4 This little piece is highly poetical. Some of the stanzas are exquisitely beautiful, and indeed the whole may be said to be vigorously conceived, and happily expressed. VIII. (A FRAGMENT.) UT for you, growing gentlemen, the happy branches of two so illustrious houses as these, wherefrom your honoured mother is in both lines descended; let me leave you this last legacy of counsel; which, so soon as you arrive at years of mature understanding, open you, sir, that are the eldest, and read it to your brethren, for it will concern you all alike. Vowed by a faithful servant and client of your family, with his latest breath expiring it. BEN JONSON. TO KENELM, JOhn, George.5 yours: BOAST not these titles of your ancestors, By which you're planted shews your fruit shall bide. Of these three sons, George probably died young. Kenelm, the eldest, a young man of great abilities and virtues, nobly redeemed the error of his grandfather, and took up arms for his sovereign. He was slain at the battle of St. Neot's in Huntingdonshire, July 7, 1648; and John is said to have succeeded to the family estate, after removing some legal bar interposed, in a moment of displeasure, by his father. The lines which follow bear a running allusion to the eighth satire of Juvenal; they are evidently a mere fragment. |