Last came Joy's ecstatic trial. He, with viny crown advancing, First to the lively pipe his hand addrest; But soon he saw the brisk awak'ning viol, Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best. They would have thought, who heard the strain, They saw in Tempe's vale her native maids, Amidst the festal sounding shades, To some unwearied minstrel dancing, While, as his flying fingers kiss'd the strings, Love fram'd with Mirth a gay fantastic round; Loose were her tresses seen, her zone unbound, And he, amidst his frolic play, As if he would the charming air repay, Shook thousand odors from his dewy wings. (COLLINS: _The Passions._ 1746.) I marked Ambition in his war-array! I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cry-- "Ah! wherefore does the Northern Conqueress stay! Groans not her chariot on its onward way?" Fly, mailed Monarch, fly! Stunned by Death's twice mortal mace, No more on murder's lurid face The insatiate hag shall gloat with drunken eye! Manes of the unnumbered slain! Ye that gasped on Warsaw's plain! Ye that erst at Ismail's tower, When human ruin choked the streams, Fell in conquest's glutted hour, Mid women's shrieks and infants' screams! Spirits of the uncoffined slain, Sudden blasts of triumph swelling, Oft, at night, in misty train, Rush around her narrow dwelling! The exterminating fiend is fled-- (Foul her life, and dark her doom)-- Mighty armies of the dead Dance, like death-fires, round her tomb! Then with prophetic song relate Each some tyrant-murderer's fate! (COLERIDGE: _Ode on the Departing Year_, strophe iii. 1796.) This ode was evidently intended to be in the regular Pindaric form, and was divided into strophes, antistrophes, and epodes; but it soon broke into irregularity. On Coleridge's odes see some remarks by Mr. Theodore Watts in the article on Poetry in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.