All the other sounds, we hear,
Flatter, and but cheat our ear.
This doth put us still in mind
That our flesh must be resign'd;
And a general silence made;

The world be muffled in a shade!
He, that on a pillow lies,
Tear-embalm'd before he dies,
Carries, like a sheep, his life,

To meet the sacrificer's knife;
And for eternity is prest,

Sad bell-weather to the rest."

The poem of Narcissus consists of 131 six-lined stanzas, and contains a large proportion of poetical passages, and many very harmonious verses. * This poem begins as follows:

1.

"Fair Echo, rise! sick-thoughted nymph, awake;
Leave thy green couch, and canopy of trees!
Long since the quiristers of the wood did shake
Their wings, and sing to the bright sun's uprise:
Day hath wept o'er thy couch, and, progressed,
Blusheth to see fair Echo still in bed.

2.

If not the birds, who 'bout the coverts fly,

And with their warbles charm the neighbouring air ¿

If not the sun, whose new embroidery

Makes rich the leaves, that in thy arbours are, Can make thee rise; yet, lovesick nymph, away! Thy young Narcissus is abroad to day.

By the motto Hac Olim, it is probable this is the same poem, as was originally published under the title of Echo, or the Infortunate Lovers, 1618, 8vo, See CENS. LIT. II. p. 382.

3. Pursue

3.

Pursue him, timorous maid: he moves apace;

Favonius waits to play with thy loose hair,

And help thy flight; see, how the drooping grass

Courts thy soft tread, thou child of sound and air;
Attempt, and overtake him; though he be
Coy to all other nymphs, he'll stoop to thee.

4.

If thy face move not, let thy eyes express

Some rhetoric of thy tears to make him stay;
He must be a rock, that will not melt at these,
Dropping these native diamonds in his way;
Mistaken he may stoop at them, and this,
Who knows how soon? may help thee to a kiss.

6.

If neither love, thy beauty, nor thy tears

Invent some other way to make him know He need not hunt, that can have such a deer; The Queen of Love did once Adonis woo; But hard of soul, with no persuasions won, He felt the curse of his disdain too soon.

7.

In vain I counsel her to put on wing;
Echo hath left her solitary grove;
And in a vale, the palace of the spring,

Sits silently attending to her love;

But round about, to catch his voice with care, every shade and tree she hid a snare.

In

8.

Now do the huntsmen fill the air with noise,

And their shrill horns chafe her delighted ear,

Which with loud accents give the woods a voice,
Proclaiming parly to the fearful deer:

She

She hears the jolly tunes; but every strain,
As high and musical she returns again.

9.

Rous'd is the game; pursuit doth put on wings;
The sun doth shine, and gild them out their way
The deer into an o'ergrown thicket springs,

Through which he quaintly steals his shine away;
The hunters scatter; but the boy, o'erthrown,
In a dark part of the wood complains alone.

10.

Him, Echo, led by her affections, found,.

Joy'd, you may guess, to reach him with her eye; But more, to see him rise without a wound,

Who yet obscures herself behind some tree: He, vext, exclaims, and asking Where am I?' The unseen virgin answers, 'Here am I!'

11.

• Some Guide from hence! will no man hear?' he cries:

She answers in her passion, 'O man,

hear!'

'I die, I die!' say both; and thus she tries

With frequent answers to entice his ear And person to her court, more fit for love,

He tracts the sound, and finds her odorous grove.

12.

The way he trod, was paved with violets

Whose azure leaves do warm their naked stalks:

In their white double ruffs the daisies jet,

And primroses are scatter'd in the walks ;

Whose pretty mixture in the ground declares
Another galaxy emboss'd with stars.

13. Twe

13.

Two rows of elms ran with proportion'd grace,
Like Nature's arras, to adorn thy sides.

The friendly vines their loved barks embrace,

While folding tops the chequer'd ground-work hides. Here oft the tired sun himself would rest,

Riding his glorious circuit to the west.

14.

From hence delight conveys him unawares
Into a spacious green, whose either side
A hill did guard, whilst with his trees, like hairs,
The clouds were busy, binding up his head;
The flowers here smile upon him, as he treads;
And but when he looks up, hang down their heads.

15.

Not far from hence, near an harmonious brook,
Within an arbour of conspiring trees,
Whose wilder boughs into the stream did look,
A place more suitable to her distress,
Echo, suspecting that her love was gone,
Herself had in a careful posture thrown.

16.

But Time upon his wings had brought the boy
To see this lodging of the airy Queen,
Whom the dejected nymph espies with joy

Thorough a small window of eglantine;
And that she might be worthy his embrace,
Forgets not to new dress her blubber'd face.

17.

With confidence she sometimes would go out

And boldly meet Narcissus in the way:
But then her fears present her with new doubt

And chide her over-rash resolve away.

Her

Her heart with over-charge of love must break;
Great Juno will not let poor Echo speak."

Oldys, in his MS. notes on Langbaine, says, "Shirley was born in the city of London, near Stock's Market, 1594. Bred up at Catherine Hall in Cambridge, (where he studied some years) with one Thomas Bancroft, as this poet tells us in his Epigrams, 4to. 1639: which Bancroft was of Swarston in Derbyshire, where his father and mother were buried, on whom he has an epitaph also, and an enigma on his birth-place. Shirley died in the parish of St. Giles's in the Fields, having been burnt out of his habitation in Fleet-street, in the great fire 1666.”

"In his Dramatic Interlude, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the armour of Achilles, is the fine song, which old Bowman used to sing to K. Charles, and which he has often sung to me.

"The glories of our birth and state," &c.

and therein also the fine lines,

"Your heads must come

To the cold tomb!

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust." *

ART. XIII. The First Four Books of Virgil's Eneis, translated into English heroical verse, by Richard Stanyhurst, with other poetical devises thereto annexed. 8vo. At London imprinted by

See it in Percy's Reliques; and in Elia's Specimens, III. 106.

VOL. IV.

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Henrie