Wesley Corpus

In vain I heave with anxious sighs: Her pleasing coyness feeds my pain And keeps the conquests of her eyes. Impetuous tides of joy and pain By turns my lab'ring bosom tear; The Queen of Love, with all her train Of hopes and fears, inhabits there. No more the wand'ring Scythian's might From softer themes my lyre shall move; No more the Parthian's wily flight: My lyre shall sing of naught but Love. Haste, grassy altars let us rear; Haste, wreaths of fragrant myrtle twine; With Arab sweets perfume the air, And crown the whole with gen'rous wine. While we the sacred rites prepare, The cruel Queen of fierce desires Will pierce, propitious to my prayer, The obdurate maid with equal fires. Integrity needs no defense; The man who trusts to Innocence, Nor wants the darts Numidians throw, Nor arrows of the Parthian bow. Secure o'er Libya's sandy seas Or hoary Caucasus he strays; O'er regions scarcely known to Fame, Washed by Hydaspes' fabled stream. While void of cares, of naught afraid, Late in the Sabine woods I strayed; On Sylvia's lips, while pleased I sung, How Love and soft Persuasion hung ! A ravenous wolf, intent on food, Rushed from the covert of the wood; Yet dared not violate the grove Secured by Innocence and Love: Nor Mauritania's sultry plain So large a savage does contain; Nor e'er so huge a monster treads Warlike Apulia's beechen shades. Place me where no revolving sun Does e'er h.is radiant circle run, Where clouds and damps alone appear And poison the unwholesome year: Place me in that effulgent day Beneath the sun's directer ray; No change from its fixed place shall move The basis of my lasting love. In imitation of' Quis desiderio sit pugor.' [Horace's Odes, I. xxiv.] What shame shall stop our flowing tears What end shall our just sorrows know Since Fate, relentless to our prayers, Has given the long destructive blow! Ye Muses, strike the sounding string, In plaintive strains his loss deplore, And teach an artless voice to sing The great, the bounteous, now no more For him the Wise and Good shall mourn, While late records his fame declare; And, oft as rolling years return, Shall pay his tomb a grateful tear. Ah I what avail their plaints to thee Ah I what avails his fame declared Thou blam'st, alas I the just decree