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Hence, redolent of joy ferene,
Divine love’s elevated mien;
Hence peace and genuine honour spread
Their blended glories round the head;
Hence the meek eye with hope replete,
Yet beaming with a seraph’s heat;
Th' Elyfian glow and every grace
Thron’d in the true Madona face.
So, poets feign, Prometheus stole
From heaven his animating coal.
Parent! ere yet their features fix,
Or folly with the heart can mix.
For in a tainted vessel pour’d.
The generous infusions’s four’d—
Be these thy arts; their fouls refine.
And all the Calipædia’s[1] thine;
For Virtue’s self (so Plato thought)
To visible existence brought,—
This, this is Beauty—must be so,
Or beauty’s but a name below.
A suiting body it creates,
Pervades, illumes, assimilates.
Thus the warm virgin-wax receives
Th’ impression that the signet gives;
Now a chaste Vestal seems, and now
The Goddess of the painted bow;
Now bears aloft the plumy crest,
And all Minerva stands confefs’d;
- ↑ A Latin poem so called, teaching the art of having beautiful children.
