Wise nature would not let your eye
Look on her own bright majesty,
Which had you once but gaz'd upon,
You could except yourself love none :
What then you cannot love, let me—
That face I can, you cannot see!

"Now, you have what you love (you'll say), What then is left for me, I pray ?”

My face, sweet Heart! if it please thee;
That which you can, I cannot see.
So either love shall gain his due,
Your's, Sweet! in me, and mine in you!

THOMAS MAY.

1628.

This writer, distinguished both as poet and historian, was born about 1596, in Sussex. He died in 1652, and lies buried in Westminster Abbey.

DEAR! do not your fair beauty wrong,
In thinking still you are too young!
The rose and lilies in your cheek
Flourish, and no more ripeness seek.

Your cherry lip, red, soft, and sweet,
Proclaims such fruit for taste most meet:
Then lose no time !-for Love has wings,
And flies away from aged things.

EDMUND WALLER.

1636.

Edmund Waller, the Laureat of the Fair, and the favourite of fortune, was born of an antient and affluent family, at Coleshill in Hertfordshire, March 3, 1605. He received a gentlemanly education; and married early, to a city heiress, who, dying shortly after their union, left him rich, handsome, accomplished, and unincumbered, at the age of twenty-five. Elated by these advantages, it was now that he declared his passion for lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, the SACHARISSA whose perfections he successfully studied to immortalise. Whatever were the motives of her aversion, his advances were never encouraged. The complaints, or rather remonstrances, of her lover betray on every occasion the mortification that her repulses inflicted; his reproaches evince more of angry disappointment, than affectionate solicitude; and, though the situation in which he offered himself might, in point of circumstances, be supposed to testify the sincerity of his professions, his vanity seems to have suffered more than his heart, by the haughtiness with which he was treated. To terminate effectually the hopes and fears of her admirer, and free herself from the irksomeness of importunity, SACHARISSA became the wife of Spenser, Earl of Sunderland. How should a beautiful woman silence the public addresses of a lover whom she does not approve, except by a public expression of her sentiments? However affected by this rejection, Waller, still confident of success, immediately avowed himself in pursuit of Lady Sophia Murray, known in his poems by the poetical appellation of A MORET! Perhaps the intimacy subsisting between Amoret and Sacharissa did not permit the former to receive one whom the latter had discarded; for with Amoret, it should seem, his fate was equally unpropitious. Indeed, the contrasted praises of the two friends, in one of his poems to Amoret, where the superiority is

repeatedly lavished on Sacharissa, cannot be supposed to have advanced him in the estimation of Amoret. There might be much sincerity in such a production, but certainly there was no gallantry.

In 1640, Waller accompanied the Earl of Warwick to the Bermuda Islands, partly to recover, by absence, from the effect of disappointed passion. Returning to England, he united himself to a lady named Bresse, by whom he had thirteen children. He died October 21, 1687, at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, where a monument is erected to his memory. SACHARISSA died in 1683, after remaining about forty years in widowhood; her Lord having unfortunately perished in the battle of Newbury, September 20, 1643, before he had completed the twentyfourth year of his age. She had, by him, one son and two daughters; and was buried in the same vault with him, at Brinton, in Northamptonshire.

Waller was again a widower, in 1643. This circumstance, though unnoticed by biographers, is evident from his speech delivered in that year at the bar of the Commons, where, imploring the mercy of the House with regard to the part he had sustained in the plot for restoring the King, he deprecates the fate of his children, "already motherless," should the sentence of his judges render them" fatherless also!"

Living at this distance from the scene of his poems, and personally unacquainted with the beauties they have portrayed, we can scarcely imagine the celebrity that Waller enjoyed, or the enthusiastic admiration with which his name was once pronounced by the graceful and the beauteous. He has said of himself,

"What then he sung, in his immortal strain,
Though unsuccessful-was not sung in vain ;
All but the Nymph that should redress his wrong,
Attend his passion, and approve his Song !"

Inconstant rather than unprincipled in politics, he celebrated Cromwell, to whom he was both related and obligated; and, on the Restoration, he praised Charles II.

to whose cause he was really attached. If he did not exhibit an example of public consistency, neither is he the first who has yielded to the fluctuations of common opinion.

THE GIRDLE.

THAT which her slender waist confin'd,
Shall now my joyful temples bind ;
No monarch but would give his crown,
His arms might do what this has done!

It was my heaven's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer!
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love
Did all within this circle move!

A narrow Compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair :
Give me but what this ribband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round!

THE DREAM.

SAY, lovely Dream! where could'st thou find

Shades to counterfeit that face?

Colours of this glorious kind

Come not from any mortal place.

In heaven itself thou sure wert drest
With that angel-like disguise!

Thus deluded, am I blest;

And see my joy with closed eyes.