THE SNAIL. WISE emblem of our politic world, Sage Snail, within thine own self curled, Compendious Snail thou seem'st to me Large Euclid's strict epitome; And in each diagram dost fling Thee from the point unto the ring. A figure now triangular, And oval now, and now a square, And then a serpentine, dost crawl; Now a straight line, now crook'd, now all. Preventing rival of the day, Thou art up and openest thy ray; Who shall a name for thee create, Nor will thy dire delivery aid. Thou, thine own daughter, then, and sire, That son and mother art entire, That big still with thy self dost go, That, like the cubs of India,. And as thy house was thine own womb, But now I must (anàlysed king) Then, after a sad dearth and rain, Now hast thou changed thee saint, and made And in thy wreathed cloister thou Walkest thine own grey-friar too; Strict and locked up, thou art hood all o'er, On salads thou dost feed severe, And 'stead of beads thou dropp'st a tear. THOMAS STANLEY. [Son of a knight in Hertfordshire: born in 1620, died in 1678. Author of a laborious History of Philosophy, and of various poetical compositions, including translations from the classic and some modern languages]. NOTE ON ANACREON. LET'S not rhyme the hours away; Let's give o'er this fool Apollo, Nor his fiddle longer follow : Fie upon his forked hill, With his fiddlestick and quill! And the Muses, though they're gamesome, They are neither young nor handsome; And their freaks, in sober sadness, Are a mere poetic madness: Pegasus is but a horse; He that follows him is worse. See, the rain soaks to the skin,— Make it rain as well within. Wine, my boy! we'll sing and laugh, All night revel, rant, and quaff; Till the morn, stealing behind us, When swift Death shall overtake us, With this draught of unmixed Rhenish; By this sparkling glass of wine; By thy thyrsus so renowned; By the healths with which thou'rt crowned; By the feasts which thou dost prize; By thy numerous victories; By the howls by Mænads made; By this haut-gout carbonade; By thy language cabalistic; By thy cymbal, drum, and his stick ; By the tunes thy quart-pots strike up ; By thy sighs, the broken hiccup; By thy never-tamèd panthers; By this sweet, this fresh and free air; By thy goat, as chaste as we are; By the flower of fairest grapes; To thy frolic order call us, ANDREW MARVELL. [Born at Hull, 1620; died on 16th August 1678, with some vague suspicion of poison. He became assistant to Milton as Cromwell's Latin secretary, and was afterwards (1660) elected to Parliament, where he continued till the close of his life-a zealous delegate of his constituents, and opponent of arbitrary measures. Marvell appears, in biographic and political record, as a thoroughly manly person; and the same is the prevailing character of his poetic work. We observe vigorous strenuous lines, a bluff and sometimes boisterous humour, keen fencing-play of wit, a strong temper, as ready to overstate a prejudice as to pile a panegyric; often too a sharp thrill of tenderness, and a full sense and full power of expressing beauty]. MOURNING. You that decipher out the fate Of human offsprings from the skies, To heaven, whence it came, their woe : When, moulding of the watery spheres, Would strew the ground where Strephon lay. Yet some affirm, pretending art, Her eyes have so her bosom drowned, Only to soften, near her heart, A place to fix another wound. And, while vain pomp does her restrain Nay, others, bolder, hence esteem That whatsoever does but seem Like grief is from her windows thrown ;— Nor that she pays, while she survives, To her dead love this tribute due; But casts abroad these donatives At the installing of a new. How wide they dream! the Indian slaves And not of one the bottom sound. THE CHARACTER OF HOLLAND. By English pilots when they heaved the lead, Fell to the Dutch by just propriety. Glad then, as miners who have found the ore, They, with mad labour, fished the land to shore, And dived as desperately for each piece Of earth as if't had been of ambergreece; Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away, Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll, Transfusing into them their dunghill soul. How did they rivet, with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their watery Babel far more high, To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky! Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played; As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what's their mare liberum. A daily deluge over them does boil; The earth and water play at level-coyl. The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed, And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest ; And oft the tritons and the sea-nymphs saw Whole shoals of Dutch served up for cabillau ; Or, as they over the new level ranged, For pickled herring, pickled heeren changed. Nature, it seemed, ashamed of her mistake, Would throw their land away at duck and drake : Therefore necessity, that first made kings, Something like government among them brings. For, as with pygmies, who best kills the crane, |