Give me that strain, of mournful touch,
We us'd to love long, long ago,

Before our hearts had known as much
As now, alas! they bleed to know!

Sweet notes! they tell of former peace,
Of all, that look'd so rapturous then,
Now wither'd, lost-oh! pray thee, cease,
I cannot bear those sounds again!

Art thou too wretched? yes, thou art;
I see thy tears flow fast with mine-
Come, come to this devoted heart,

"Tis breaking, but it still is thine!

A

VISION OF PHILOSOPHY.

"TWAS on the Red Sea coast, at morn, we met
The venerable man*; a virgin bloom

Of softness mingled with the vigorous thought
That tower'd upon his brow; as when we see

* In Plutarch's Essay on the Decline of the Oracles, Cleombrotus, one of the interlocutors, describes an extraordinary man whom he had met with, after long research, upon the banks of the Red Sea. Once in every year this supernatural personage appeared to mortals, and conversed with them; the rest of his time he passed among the Genii and the Nymphs. Περι την ερυθραν θάλασσαν ένξον, ανθρωποις ανα παν ετος άπαξ εντυγχανοντα, ταλλα δε συν ταις νύμφαις, νομασι και δαίμοσι, ὡς εφασκε. He spoke in a tone not far removed from singing, and whenever he opened his lips, a fragrance filled the place: pɛyouevo de τον τόπον ευωδια κατείχε, το ςόματος ηδιςον αποπνέοντος. From him Cleombrotus learned the doctrine of a plurality of worlds.

The gentle moon and the full radiant sun
Shining in heaven together. When he spoke

'Twas language sweeten'd into song—such holy sounds

As oft the spirit of the good man hears,
Prelusive to the harmony of heaven,

When death is nigh* ! and still, as he unclos'd
His sacred lips, an odour, all as bland
As ocean-breezes gather from the flowers
That blossom in elysium †, breath'd around!
With silent awe we listen'd, while he told
Of the dark veil, which many an age had hung
O'er nature's form, till by the touch of time
The mystic shroud grew thin and luminous,
And half the goddess beam'd in glimpses through it!
Of magic wonders, that were known and taught

* The celebrated Janus Dousa, a little before his death, imagined that he heard a strain of music in the air. See the poem of Heinsius “In harmoniam quam paulo ante obitum audire sibi visus est Dousa." Page 501.

νασον ωκεανίδες

δεν θα μακαρων

αυραι περιπνευσιν: αγ

θεμα δε χρυσο φλεγει. Pindar. Olymp. ii.

By him (or Cham or Zoroaster named)
Who mus'd, amid the mighty cataclysm,
O'er his rude tablets of primeval lore *,
Nor let the living star of science + sink
Beneath the waters, which ingulph'd the world !—
Of visions, by Calliope reveal'd

To him, who trac'd upon his typic lyre

* Cham, the son of Noah, is supposed to have taken with him into the ark the principal doctrines of magical, or rather of natural, science, which he had inscribed upon ~ some very durable substances, in order that they might resist the ravages of the deluge, and transmit the secrets of antediluvian knowledge to his posterity. See the ex tracts made by Bayle, in his article Cham. The identity of Cham and Zoroaster depends upon the authority of Berosus, or the impostor Annius, and a few more such res pectable testimonies. See Naudé's Apologie pour les Grands Hommes, &c. chap. 8, where he takes more trouble than is necessary in refuting this gratuitous supposition.

+ Chamum à posteris hujus artis admiratoribus Zoroastrum, seu vivum astrum, propterea fuisse dictum et pro Deo habitum. Bochart. Geograph. Sacr. Lib. iv. cap. 1.

‡ Orpheus.-Paulinus, in his Hebdomades, cap. 2. Lib. iii. has endeavoured to shew, after the Platonists, that man is a diapason, made up of a diatesseron, which is his soul, and a diapente, which is his body. Those frequent alluVOL. II.

The diapason of man's mingled frame,
And the grand Doric heptachord of heaven!

sions to music, by which the ancient philosophers illustrated their sublime theories, must have tended very much to elevate the character of the art, and to enrich it with associations of the grandest and most interesting nature. See a preceding note, Vol. I. p. 54, for their ideas upon the harmony of the spheres. Heraclitus compared the mixture of good and evil in this world to the blended varieties of harmony in a musical instrument; (Plutarch. de Animæ Procreat.) and Euryphamus, the Pythagorean, in a fragment preserved by Stobæus, describes human life, in its perfection, as a sweet and well-tuned lyre. Some of the ancients were so fanciful as to suppose that the operations of the memory were regulated by a kind of musical cadence, and that ideas occurred to it "per arsin et thesin." while others converted the whole man into a mere harmonized machine, whose motion depended upon a certain tension of the body, analogous to that of the strings in an instrument. Cicero indeed ridicules Aristoxenus for this fancy, and says, "let him teach singing, and leave philosophy to Aristotle;" but Aristotle himself, though decidedly opposed to the harmonic speculations of the Pythagoreans and Platonists, could sometimes condescend to enliven his doctrines by reference to the beauties of musical science; as, in the treatise Пɛg oops attributed to him, Καθαπερ δε εν χορώ, κορυφαια καταρξαντος. κ. τ. λ.

The Abbé Batteux, upon the doctrine of the Stoics, attributes to those philosophers the same mode of illustration.