Thus, long ago, Ere heaving bellows learn'd to blow, While organs{24} yet were mute; Timotheus to his breathing flute, And sounding lyre, Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire. At last divine Cecilia came, Inventress of the vocal frame;{25} The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store, Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before. Let old Timotheus yield the prize, Or both divide the crown: He rais'd a mortal to the skies; She drew an angel down.{26} _Grand Chorus._ At last divine Cecilia came, Inventress of the vocal frame; The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store, Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before. Let old Timotheus yield the prize, Or both divide the crown: He rais'd a mortal to the skies She drew an angel down. NOTES. This song was written in 1697. Lord Bolingbroke relates that, calling upon the poet one morning, Dryden said to him: "I have been up all night; my musical friends made me promise to write them an ode for their Feast of St. Cecilia, and I was so struck with the subject which occurred to me that I could not leave it till I had completed it: here it is, finished at one sitting." The poem was first set to music by one Jeremiah Clarke, a steward of the Musical Society, whose members had solicited Dryden to write it. In 1736 it was rearranged by the great composer Handel, and again presented at a public performance. M. Taine says, "His 'Alexander's Feast' is an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a master-piece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up to." "As a piece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, or recited in alternate strophe and anti-strophe," says Hazlitt, "nothing can be better." "This ode is Dryden's greatest and best work."--_Macaulay._ 1. =royal feast.= About the year B.C. 331, Alexander the Great, having overthrown the Persian Empire, held a great feast at Persepolis in celebration of his victories. At the close of the revelries, instigated, it is said, by Thais, his Athenian mistress, he set fire with his own hand to the great palace of Persepolis; and a general massacre of the inhabitants ensued. The ruins of the city and palace are still to be seen in a beautiful valley watered by the river Araxes--now called Bendemir--not far from the border of the Carmanian Desert. 2. =with roses and with myrtles.= At the banquets of the Greeks it was the custom of the guests to wear garlands of roses and myrtles.