[Page]

TO A FRIEND.

DEAR FRIEND,

I HAVE received both your favours The Muse alone must tell my joy.

1 O'ERWHELM'D with pleasure at the joyful news,
2 I strung the chorded shell, and woke the Muse.
3 Begin, O Servant of the Sacred Nine!
4 And echo joy through ev'ry nervous line:
5 Bring down th' etherial Choir to aid the Song;
6 Let boundless raptures smoothly glide along.
[Page 2]
7 My Baker's well! Oh words of sweet delight!
8 Now! now! my Muse, soar up th' Olympic height.
9 What wond'rous numbers can the Goddess find,
10 To paint th' extatic raptures of my mind?
11 I leave it to a Goddess more divine,
12 The beauteous H—l—d shall employ my line.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 34K / ZIP - 4.6K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 554 / ZIP - 551 )

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized from a copy in the Bodleian Library [Harding C 696 (1)].)

Images

  • Image #1 (JPEG - [an error occurred while processing this directive])
  • Image #2 (JPEG - [an error occurred while processing this directive])

PDF

All Images (PDF - [an error occurred while processing this directive])

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): TO A FRIEND.
Themes:
Genres: heroic couplet; address

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Chatterton, Thomas, 1752-1770. A Supplement to the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton London: printed for T. Becket, in Pall-Mall; Bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Their Royal Highnesses the Princes. MDCCLXXXIV., 1784, pp. []-2. [6],ii,88p.; 8⁰. (ESTC T48948; OTA K045459.000) (Page images digitized from a copy in the Bodleian Library [Harding C 696 (1)].)

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.

Other works by Thomas Chatterton