[Page 271]

A VERNAL ODE.

Sent to his Grace the Lord Archbishop of CANTERBURY, March 12, 1754.

By FRANCIS FAWKES, A. M.
I.
1 BRIGHT God of day, whose genial, power
2 Revives the buried seed,
3 That spreads with foliage every bower,
4 With verdure every mead,
5 Bid all thy vernal breezes fly,
6 Diffusing mildness thro' the sky;
7 Give the soft season to our drooping plains,
8 Sprinkled with rosy dews, and salutary rains.
II.
9 Enough has Winter's hand severe
10 Hurl'd all his terrors round,
11 Chill'd the fair dawning of the year,
12 And whiten'd all the ground:
13 Give but thy vital beams to play,
14 The frozen scenes will melt away;
15 And, mix in sprightly dance, the blooming Hours
16 Will 'wake the drowsy Spring, and Spring awake the flowers.
[Page 272]
17 Let Health, gay daughter of the skies,
18 On Zephyr's wings descend,
19 And scatter pleasures as she flies
20 Where Surry's downs extend;
21 There HERRING wooes her friendly power,
22 There may she all her roses shower,
23 To heal that shepherd all her balms employ,
24 So will she sooth our fears, and give a nation joy.
IV.
25 Ah me! that Virtue's godlike friends
26 So soon are claim'd by Fate!
27 Lo!
* The Right Honourable Henry Pelham, Esq died on the 6th of March 1754.
PELHAM to the grave descends,
28 The bulwark of the state:
29 When will fair Truth his equal find
30 Among the best of human kind?
31 Long be the fatal day with mourning kept!
32 AUGUSTUS sigh'd sincere, and all the worthy wept.
V.
33 Thy delegate, kind heaven, restore
34 To health, and safely keep;
35 Let good AUGUSTUS sigh no more,
36 No more the worthy weep:
37 And still upon the royal head
38 The riches of thy blessings shed:
39 Establish'd with his counsellors around,
40 Long be his prosp'rous reign, and all with glory crown'd.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 86K / ZIP - 10K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 1.6K / ZIP - 1.1K)

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

Images

PDF

All Images (PDF - 1.4M)

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): A VERNAL ODE. Sent to his Grace the Lord Archbishop of CANTERBURY, March 12, 1754.
Author: Francis Fawkes
Themes: politics; weather
Genres: ode
References: DMI 26245

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Dodsley, Robert, 1703-1764. A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. IV. London: printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley, 1763 [1st ed. 1758], pp. 271-272. 6v.: music; 8⁰. (ESTC T131163; OTA K104099.004) (Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

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.