O gracious God! how far have we Profaned Thy heavenly gift of poesy! Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, Debased to each obscene and impious use, Whose harmony was first ordained above, For tongues of angels and for hymns of love! O wretched we! why were we hurried down This lubric and adulterate age (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own), To increase the steaming ordures of the stage? What can we say to excuse our second fall? Let this thy Vestal, heaven, atone for all! Her Arethusan stream remains unsoiled, Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled; Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child. Art she had none, yet wanted none, For Nature did that want supply: So rich in treasures of her own, She might our boasted stores defy: Such noble vigour did her verse adorn That it seemed borrowed, where ’twas only born. Her morals, too, were in her bosom bred, By great examples daily fed, What in the best of books, her father’s life, she read. And to be read herself she need not fear; Each test and every light her muse will bear, Though Epictetus with his lamp were there. Even love (for love sometimes her muse expressed) Was but a lambent flame which played about her breast, Light as the vapours of a morning dream; So cold herself, while she such warmth expressed, ’Twas Cupid bathing in Diana’s stream. * * * * * When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound, To raise the nations underground; When in the valley of Jehosophat The judging God shall close the book of Fate, And there the last assizes keep For those who wake and those who sleep; When rattling bones together fly From the four quarters of the sky; When sinews o’er the skeletons are spread, Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead; The sacred poets first shall hear the sound, And foremost from the tomb shall bound, For they are covered with the lightest ground; And straight with inborn vigour, on the wing, Like mountain larks, to the new morning sing. There thou, sweet saint, before the choir shalt go, As harbinger of heaven, the way to show, The way which thou so well hast learned below. APHRA BEHN 1640–1689 SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR LOVE in fantastic triumph sat, Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed, For whom fresh pains he did create; And strange tyrannic power he showed. From thy bright eyes he took his fires, Which round about in sport he hurled; But ’twas from mine he took desires Enough to undo the amorous world.