Then, first aroused in that appointed hour, The Tragic Muse confess'd th' inspiring power; Sudden before the startled earth she stood, A giant spectre, weeping tears and blood; Guilt shrunk appall'd, Despair embraced his shroud, And Terror shriek'd, and Pity sobb'd aloud; Then, first Thalia with dilated ken

Not always does the great historic muse fill up the flaws of story, leaving rather much to the imagination.

Drayton's sweet muse is like a sanguine dye, Able to ravish the rash gazer's eye.

It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse.

Mr. Edmund Smith in his beautiful verses on our Author's Death, speaks thus concerning this poem; 'In her best light the comic muse appears, When she with borrowed pride the buskin wears.'

what need my humble muse to tell, When Rapture's self has echoed forth thy fame?

" Here we have him alone, at peace with himself and the world; happy in the contemplation of his beloved muse; jotting down, now and then, the brilliant ideas that flash through his teeming brain; and munching in solitude his homely meal of bread and cheese.

'For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose, The best good man, with the worst-natured muse.' Rochester's Imitations of Horace, Sat. i. 10.

"Every error I could find, Have my busy muse employed.

Urania, the celestial muse, is now unfolding before our astonished eyes the panoramas of infinity, and we know at last that we are not the children of the earth, but citizens of the heavens.

With diaries, as Dryden has expressed it, The officious muses came along, A gay, harmonious quire, like angels ever young.

To find employment for my pen, I wandered from the haunts of men, And sought a little rising ground, With lofty oaks and elm trees crowned, Where I might court the friendly muse, Who ever thinks herself abused When woo'd 'midst tumult, noise and strife, And all the busy cares of life.

Witnesse, ye muses, how I wilful sung These heady rhimes, withouten second care; And wish'd them worse my guilty thoughts among; The ruder satire should go ragg'd and bare, And shew his rougher and his hairy hide, Tho' mine be smooth, and deck'd in carelesse pride.

Instead of Coleridge being the first whose muse had soared in the new Drury, Drury was the first place in which his dramatic muse had soared.

[A] O gentle Muses!

And well could you, in your immortal strains, Describe his conduct, and reward his pains: But since the state has all your cares engross'd, And poetry in higher thoughts is lost, Attend to what a lesser Muse indites, Pardon her faults and countenance her flights.

Her turn was chiefly to philosophical or divine subjects; yet could her heavenly muse descend from its sublime height to the easy epistolary stile, and suit itself to my then gay disposition.

He is often puerile, diffuse, and artificial, and seems to have but little acquaintance with those chaster and severer graces, by whom the epic muse would be most suitably attended.

Love, obedience, and devotion unto death, are here portrayed; and yet people will repeat the lines of the melancholy muse with a smile on their faces, and even teach it to their young children as a sort of joyful lyric.

I am sure that this choice does not arise from the minstrels themselves having craft enough to select "a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse."

We know little to-day of The sacred dramas of Miss Hannah More Where Moses and the little muses snore,

Or if his lumpish fancy does refuse Spirit and grace, to his loose slattern muse? Five hundred verses every morning writ, Prove him no more a poet than a wit.

Lucretius is indisputably one of the mighty poets of the world, but Epicureanism is not the soul of that majestic muse.

This favourite of fortune and the minor muses, in the course of a short tour through the north of Italy in the autumn of 1819, found his noble friend on the 8th of October at La Mira, went with him on a sight-seeing expedition to Venice, and passed five or six days in his company.

To spend well what rich people are justified in expending over and above an ample provision for the necessities and reasonable comforts of a large existence is an art in itself, and the modest muse of good taste loves not the rich man for his riches, nor the successful primadonna for the thousands she has a right to throw away if she likes.