COWLEY.

Hope, Fortune's cheating lottery,

Where for one prize an hundred blanks there be:
Fond archer, Hope, who tak'st thine aim so far,
That still or short or wide thine arrows are:
Thine empty cloud the eye itself deceives
With shapes that our own fancy gives:
A cloud which gilt and painted now appears,
But must drop presently in tears.

When thy false beams o'er reason's light prevail,
By ignes fatui, not North stars, we sail.

CRASHAW.

Fair Hope! our earlier heaven, by thee

Young Time is taster to Eternity.

The generous wine with age grows strong, not sour;

Nor need we kill thy fruit to smell thy flower.

Thy golden head never hangs down,

Till in the lap of love's full noon

It falls and dies. O, no, it melts away
As doth the dawn into the day :

As lumps of sugar lose themselves, and twine
Their subtle essence with the soul of wine.

COWLEY.

Brother of Fear! more gaily clad,

The merrier fool o' th' two, yet quite as mad:
Sire of repentance! shield of fond desire,
That blows the chymic's and the lover's fire,
Still leading them insensibly on,

With the strange witchcraft of Anon!

By thee the one doth changing nature through Her endless labyrinths pursue,

And th' other chases woman, while she goes

More ways and turns than hunted Nature knows.

CRASHAW.

Fortune, alas! above the world's law wars: Hope kicks the curled heads of conspiring stars : Her keel cuts not the waves where our winds stir, And Fate's whole lottery is one blank to her. Her shafts and she fly far above,

And forage in the fields of light and love.

Sweet Hope! kind cheat! fair fallacy! by thee
We are not where or what we be,

But what and where we would: thus art thou
Our absent presence, and our future now.

COWLEY.

Faith's sister! nurse of fair desire! Fear's antidote! a wise, a well-stay'd fire Temper'd 'twixt cold despair and torrid joy : Queen regent in young love's minority! Though the vex'd chymic vainly chases His fugitive gold through all her faces, And love's more fierce, more fruitless fires assay One face more fugitive than they,

True Hope's a glorious huntress, and her chase,— The God of nature in the field of grace!

N

MUSIC'S DUEL.

OW westward Sol had spent the richest beams

Of noon's high glory, when, hard by the
streams

Of Tiber, on the scene of a green plat,
Under protection of an oak, there sat

A sweet lute's master: in whose gentle airs
He lost the day's heat, and his own hot cares.

Close in the covert of the leaves there stood

A nightingale, come from the neighbouring wood:-
The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,
Their muse, their Syren, harmless Syren she,-
There stood she list'ning, and did entertain
The music's soft report, and mould the same
In her own murmurs, that whatever mood
His curious fingers lent, her voice made good.
The man perceived his rival, and her art;
Disposed to give the light-foot lady sport,
Awakes his lute, and 'gainst the fight to come
Informs it, in a sweet præludium

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