[Page]

LINES IN IMITATION OF COWLEY.

1 TOUCH'D by thy wit, my soul's on fire,
2 My bosom throbs with young desire.
3 What! though thy form I never saw,
4 Is there to man divulg'd a law
5 That only what he sees must touch his heart?
6 The vulgar rule I disallow,
7 And in my passion feel e'en now,
8 That wit, like beauty, gives the tender smart.
9 Methinks thy form I would not know,
10 Nor to thy face the pleasure owe
11 Of these delicious melting pains,
12 Which when a mortal once attains,
13 He knows the greatest bliss for man design'd.
14 No, to my fancy I'll apply,
15 There find thy form, thy air, thy eye,
16 And feast my frenzy with a zest refin'd.
17 When in a pensive mood I sit,
18 And Melancholy takes her fit,
19 Mild, tender, soft, thou shalt appear,
20 Like the first blossoms of the year:
21 But when in brisker tides my spirits run,
22 L'Allegro shall the pencil take,
23 Describe thy look, thy step, thy make,
24 And shew thee lively as bright MAIA's son.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 51K / ZIP - 5.8K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 936 / ZIP - 733 )

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): LINES IN IMITATION OF COWLEY.
Author: Hannah Cowley (née Parkhouse)
Themes: wit
Genres: imitation

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Cowley, Mrs. (Hannah), 1743-1809. The Maid of Arragon; a Tale. By Mrs. Cowley. Part I. London: printed by T. Spilsbury, for L. Davis, T. Longman, J. Dodsley, T. Cadell, W. Owen, S. Crowder, T. Davies, T. Becket, G. Kearsley, C. Dilly, T. Evans, Richardson and Urquhart, and R. Faulder. M,DCC,LXXX., 1780. [6],46,[4]p.; 4⁰. (ESTC T38853; OTA K039355.000)

Editorial principles

The text has been typographically modernized, but without any silent modernization of spelling, capitalization, or punctuation. The source of the text is given and all editorial interventions have been recorded in textual notes. Based on the electronic text originally produced by the TCP project, this ECPA text has been edited to conform to the recommendations found in Level 5 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries version 4.0.0.