Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,

If Johnson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakspeare, fancy's child,
Warble his native wood notes wild.

130

And ever against eating cares,

Lap me in soft Lydian airs,

Married to immortal verse,

Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout

135

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,

140

of this line as regarding the moon; and the five next lines tend to warrant the general contents of those notes by pointing to the practice of youthful poets studying the pictures in the moon on summer-nights; and point to that practice as particularly adopted by Shakspeare, as attempted to be shewn in the preceding volumes: and this again (considering who speaks) is still strengthened by the expression in 136, Lap me in soft Lydian airs married to verse. The general drift, however, of the concluding lines of the poem from the 136th

With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,

The melting voice through mazes running, Untwisting all the chains that tye

The hidden soul of harmony;

That Orpheus' self may heave his head 145 From golden slumber on a bed

Of heapt Elysian flow'rs, and hear

Such strains as would have won the ear

Of Pluto, to have quite set free

His half-regain'd Eurydice.

These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

line, seems to be to point to the music of the spheres (of which poetical fancy I have already said an explanation is not wanting); and a great share of that music, under any explanation, must naturally be conceived to be attributable to the moon, whose planetary wanderings or mazes are particularly alluded to in the 142nd line. The two last lines of the Poem refer to the constant amusement resulting from the various poetical compositions to which the pictures in the moon have, in almost all known time, given rise.

IL PENSEROSO.

IL PENSEROSO.

Hence vain deluding joys,

The brood of folly without father bred, How little you bested,

Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys!

1. The character of Il Penseroso is to be ascribed not to the commonly-introduced or mid dlemost of the three outlines of Hudibras's face, but to the hithermost of them; that is to say, to the same dark shadows as constitute the prototype of Hamlet when "transformed" (fig. 66) or the same as constitute Anthonio in the Merchant of Venice "when grown sad by his losses." In this character his cast of countenance is peculiarly contemplative, as alluded to in line 4 by the expression "fixed mind;" while the terms "brood of folly" in the second line and idle brain" in the fifth are to be referred to lunacy, as supposed to be connected with the moon.