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IL PENSEROSO.

IL PENSEROSO.

HENCE, vain deluding Joys,

The brood of Folly without father bred, How little you bested,

Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys? Dwell in some idle brain,

And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sun-beams, Or likeliest hovering dreams,

The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train.
But hail thou goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy,

Whose faintly visage is too bright

To hit the sense of human sight,

And therefore to our weaker view

O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue;

Black, but such as in esteem,

Prince Memnon's sister might beseem,
Or that starr'd Ethiop queen that strove
To set her beauties' praise above

The sea-nymphs, and their pow'rs offended:
Yet thou art higher far descended;
Thee bright-hair'd Vesta long of yore
To solitary Saturn bore;

His daughter she, (in Saturn's reign
Such mixture was not held a stain,)
Oft in glimmering bowers and glades
He met her, and in secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,

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While yet there was no fear of Jove.
Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, stedfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of Cyprus lawn,
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step, and musing gait,
And looks commersing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:
There held in holy passion still,
Forget thyself to marble, till

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