Ye nightingales, ye twisting pines!
Ye swains that haunt the grove!
Ye gentle echoes, breezy winds!
Ye close retreats of love!

With all of nature, all of art,
Assist the dear design;

O teach a young, unpractised heart
To make my Nancy mine!

The very thought of change I hate,
As much as of despair;

Nor ever covet to be great,
Unless it be for her.

'Tis true, the passion in my mind
Is mixed with soft distress;
Yet while the fair I love is kind,

I cannot wish it less.

SONG.

When thy beauty appears,

In its graces and airs,

All bright as an angel new dropped from the sky;
At distance I gaze, and am awed by my fears,

So strangely you dazzle my eye!

But when without art,

Your kind thoughts you impart,

When your love runs in blushes through every vein;

When it darts from your eyes, when it pants in your heart,
Then I know you're a woman again.

There's a passion and pride

In our sex, she replied,

And thus (might I gratify both) I would do;

Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.

MATTHEW PRIOR.

1664-1721.

“PRIOR was not a right good man," Pope is made to say in Spence's Anecdotes. “He used to bury himself, for whole days and nights together, with a poor mean creature, and often drank hard. He left most of his effects to the poor woman he kept company with, his Chloe; everybody knows what a wretch she was. I think she had been a little alehouse-keeper's wife." "This celebrated lady," Spence added in a note, “is now married to a cobbler at ****." "Prior had a narrow escape by dying," Arbuthnot wrote to a friend, "for if he had lived he had married a brimstone one Bessy Cox, that keeps an alehouse in Long Acre. Her husband died about a month ago, and Prior has left his estate between his servant, Jonathan Drift, and Bessy Cox. Lewis got drunk with punch with Bess night before last. Do not say where you had this news of Prior. I hope all my mistress' ministers will not behave themselves so. We are to have a bowl of punch at Bessy Cox's. She would fain have put it upon Lewis that she was his Emma. She owned Flanders Jane was his Chloe. I know of no security against this dotage in bachelors, but to repent of their misspent time, and marry with speed."

AN ODE.

The merchant, to secure his treasure,
Conveys it in a borrowed name;
Euphelia serves to grace my measure,
But Cloe is my real flame.

My softest verse, my darling lyre,
Upon Euphelia's toilet lay;

When Cloe noted her desire,

That I should sing, that I should play.

My lyre I tune, my voice I raise,

But with my numbers mix my sighs;

And whilst I sing Euphelia's praise,
I fix my soul on Cloe's eyes.

Fair Cloe blushed: Euphelia frowned:

I sung and gazed: I played and trembled:

And Venus to the Loves around

Remarked, how ill we all dissembled.

TO CLOE WEEPING.

See, while thou weep'st, fair Cloe, see
The world in sympathy with thee.
The cheerful birds no longer sing;

Each droops his head, and hangs his wing.
The clouds have bent their bosoms lower,
And shed their sorrows in a shower.
The brooks beyond their limits flow;
And louder murmurs speak their woe.
The nymphs and swains adopt thy cares;
They heave thy sighs, and weep thy tears.
Fantastic nymph! that grief should move
Thy heart obdurate against Love.

Strange tears! whose power can soften all,
But that dear breast on which they fall.

A SONG.

If wine and music have the power
To ease the sickness of the soul;
Let Phoebus every string explore,
And Bacchus fill the sprightly bowl.
Let them their friendly aid employ,
To make my Cloe's absence light;
And seek for pleasure, to destroy
The sorrows of this live-long night.

But she to-morrow will return;
Venus, be thou to-morrow great;
Thy myrtles strew, thy odours burn,
And meet thy favourite nymph in state.
Kind Goddess, to no other powers
Let us to-morrow's blessings own:
Thy darling Loves shall guide the hours,
And all the day be all thine own.

SONG.

In vain you tell your parting lover,
You wish fair winds may waft him over.
Alas! what winds can happy prove,

That bear me far from what I love?
Alas! what dangers on the main
Can equal those that I sustain,
From slighted vows, and cold disdain?
Be gentle, and in pity choose
To wish the wildest tempests loose:
That, thrown again upon the coast,
Where first my shipwrecked heart was lost,
I may once more repeat my pain;
Once more in dying notes complain
Of slighted vows, and cold disdain.

ALEXANDER POPE.

1688-1744.

THE feminine attachments of Pope fitted into each other like a nest of boxes. He was partial to three women, Teresa and Martha Blount, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but whether this partiality ever deepened into love may be doubted. If it did it was for Martha Blount. She was the daughter of Mr. Lister Blount, of Mapledurham. It is not known with certainty when Pope became acquainted with the Blounts, but it was before 1712, when he addressed an epistle to Martha, probably as early as 1707, when he lived with his parents at Binfield. The manor of Mapledurham at the furthest was only ten miles from Binfield, and it was natural that the families should know each other. In the absence of a stronger reason, the bond of a common faith, at that time a proscribed one in England, would have occasionally brought them together. Be this however as it may, we know that they were acquainted, at an early period of Pope's life, and that Pope himself was a frequent visitor at Mapledurham. The Blount girls were about his own age, Teresa being born in the same year with himself, and Martha two years later. Which of them first attracted him is a matter of conjecture, for their empire over his heart seems to have been a divided one. He wrote letters to both with the greatest impartiality. Many of these letters he afterwards printed, and not always with the original direction. "You are to understand, madam," he says in one of them, แ "that my passion for your fair self and your sister has been divided with the most wonderful regularity in the world. Even from my infancy, I have been in love with one after the other of you, week by week, and my journey to Bath fell out in the three hundred seventy-sixth week of the reign of my sovereign lady Sylvia. At the present writing hereof it is the three hundred eighty-ninth week of the reign of your most serene majesty, in whose service I was listed some weeks before I beheld your sister." This letter was probably written to Teresa, whose reign on the whole was a troubled one. Having more wit and vivacity than her sister, she was less disposed to bear the captious exactions of her lover. "I must own," he wrote to Martha in 1714, "I have long been shocked at your sister on several accounts, but above all things at her prudery. I am resolved to break with her forever, and therefore tell her I shall take the first opportunity of sending back all her letters." This direful "first opportunity" was a long time coming, for three years later Pope and Teresa were on such good terms that he executed