10 Best Famous Sculptors Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Sculptors poems. This is a select list of the best famous Sculptors poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Sculptors poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of sculptors poems.

• All Famous Sculptors Poems

 Deep in th' abyss where frantic horror bides, 
In thickest mists of vapours fell,
Where wily Serpents hissing glare
And the dark Demon of Revenge resides,
At midnight's murky hour
Thy origin began: 
Rapacious MALICE was thy sire;
Thy Dam the sullen witch, Despair;
Thy Nurse, insatiate Ire. 
The FATES conspir'd their ills to twine,
About thy heart's infected shrine;
They gave thee each disastrous spell,
Each desolating pow'r,
To blast the fairest hopes of man. 

Soon as thy fatal birth was known, 
From her unhallow'd throne
With ghastly smile pale Hecate sprung; 
Thy hideous form the Sorc'ress press'd
With kindred fondness to her breast; 
Her haggard eye
Short forth a ray of transient joy, 
Whilst thro' th' infernal shades exulting clamours rung. 

Above thy fellow fiends thy tyrant hand
Grasp'd with resistless force supreme command: 
The dread terrific crowd
Before thy iron sceptre bow'd. 
Now, seated in thy ebon cave, 
Around thy throne relentless furies rave: 
A wreath of ever-wounding thorn
Thy scowling brows encompass round, 
Thy heart by knawing Vultures torn, 
Thy meagre limbs with deathless scorpions bound. 
Thy black associates, torpid IGNORANCE, 
And pining JEALOUSY­with eye askance,
With savage rapture execute thy will, 
And strew the paths of life with every torturing ill 

Nor can the sainted dead escape thy rage; 
Thy vengeance haunts the silent grave, 
Thy taunts insult the ashes of the brave; 
While proud AMBITION weeps thy rancour to assuage. 
The laurels round the POET's bust, 
Twin'd by the liberal hand of Taste, 
By thy malignant grasp defac'd, 
Fade to their native dust: 
Thy ever-watchful eye no labour tires, 
Beneath thy venom'd touch the angel TRUTH expires. 

When in thy petrifying car
Thy scaly dragons waft thy form, 
Then, swifter, deadlier far 
Than the keen lightning's lance, 
That wings its way across the yelling storm, 
Thy barbed shafts fly whizzing round, 
While every with'ring glance
Inflicts a cureless wound. 

Thy giant arm with pond'rous blow
Hurls genius from her glorious height, 
Bends the fair front of Virtue low, 
And meanly pilfers every pure delight. 
Thy hollow voice the sense appalls, 
Thy vigilance the mind enthralls; 
Rest hast thou none,­by night, by day, 
Thy jealous ardour seeks for prey­
Nought can restrain thy swift career; 
Thy smile derides the suff'rer's wrongs; 
Thy tongue the sland'rers tale prolongs; 
Thy thirst imbibes the victim's tear; 
Thy breast recoils from friendship's flame; 
Sick'ning thou hear'st the trump of Fame; 
Worth gives to thee, the direst pang; 
The Lover's rapture wounds thy heart, 
The proudest efforts of prolific art 
Shrink from thy poisonous fang. 

In vain the Sculptor's lab'ring hand 
Calls fine proportion from the Parian stone; 
In vain the Minstrel's chords command
The soft vibrations of seraphic tone; 
For swift thy violating arm 
Tears from perfection ev'ry charm; 
Nor rosy YOUTH, nor BEAUTY's smiles
Thy unrelenting rage beguiles, 
Thy breath contaminates the fairest name, 
And binds the guiltless brow with ever-blist'ring shame.

 Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses' necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!

 Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigures them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

 Ah, stay thy treacherous hand, forbear to trace
Those faultless forms of elegance and grace!
Ah, cease to spread the bright transparent mass,
With Titian's pencil, o'er the speaking glass!
Nor steal, by strokes of art with truth combin'd,
The fond illusions of my wayward mind!
For long, enamour'd of a barbarous age,
A faithless truant to the classic page;
Long have I lov'd to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rime;
To view the festive rites, the knightly play,
That deck'd heroic Albion's elder day;
To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold,
And the rough castle, cast in giant mould;
With Gothic manners Gothic arts explore,
And muse on the magnificence of yore.

But chief, enraptur'd have I lov'd to roam,
A lingering votary, the vaulted dome,
Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride,
Their mingling branches shoot from side to side;
Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew,
O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew;
Where Superstition with capricious hand
In many a maze the wreathed window plann'd,
With hues romantic ting'd the gorgeous pane,
To fill with holy light the wondrous fane;
To aid the builder's model, richly rude,
By no Vitruvian symmetry subdu'd;
To suit the genius of the mystic pile:
Whilst as around the far-retiring aisle,
And fretted shrines, with hoary trophies hung,
Her dark illumination wide she flung,
With new solemnity, the nooks profound,
The caves of death, and the dim arches frown'd.
From bliss long felt unwillingly we part:
Ah, spare the weakness of a lover's heart!
Chase not the phantoms of my fairy dream,
Phantoms that shrink at Reason's painful gleam!
That softer touch, insidious artist, stay,
Nor to new joys my struggling breast betray!

Such was a pensive bard's mistaken strain.--
But, oh, of ravish'd pleasures why complain?
No more the matchless skill I call unkind,
That strives to disenchant my cheated mind.
For when again I view thy chaste design,
The just proportion, and the genuine line;
Those native portraitures of Attic art,
That from the lucid surface seem to start;
Those tints, that steal no glories from the day,
Nor ask the sun to lend his streaming ray:
The doubtful radiance of contending dyes,
That faintly mingle, yet distinctly rise;
'Twixt light and shade the transitory strife;
The feature blooming with immortal life:
The stole in casual foldings taught to flow,
Not with ambitious ornaments to glow;
The tread majestic, and the beaming eye,
That lifted speaks its commerce with the sky;
Heaven's golden emanation, gleaming mild
O'er the mean cradle of the Virgin's child:
Sudden, the sombrous imagery is fled,
Which late my visionary rapture fed:
Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain,
And brought my bosom back to truth again;
To truth, by no peculiar taste confin'd,
Whose universal pattern strikes mankind;
To truth, whose bold and unresisted aim
Checks frail caprice, and fashion's fickle claim;
To truth, whose charms deception's magic quell,
And bind coy Fancy in a stronger spell.

Ye brawny Prophets, that in robes so rich,
At distance due, possess the crisped niche;
Ye rows of Patriarchs, that sublimely rear'd
Diffuse a proud primeval length of beard:
Ye Saints, who clad in crimson's bright array,
More pride than humble poverty display:
Ye Virgins meek, that wear the palmy crown
Of patient faith, and yet so fiercely frown:
Ye Angels, that from clouds of gold recline,
But boast no semblance to a race divine:
Ye tragic tales of legendary lore,
That draw devotion's ready tear no more;
Ye martyrdoms of unenlighten'd days,
Ye miracles, that now no wonder raise:
Shapes, that with one broad glare the gazer strike,
Kings, bishops, nuns, apostles, all alike!
Ye colours, that th' unwary sight amaze,
And only dazzle in the noontide blaze!
No more the sacred window's round disgrace,
But yield to Grecian groups the shining space.
Lo, from the canvas Beauty shifts her throne,
Lo, Picture's powers a new formation own!
Behold, she prints upon the crystal plain,
With her own energy, th' expressive stain!
The mighty master spreads his mimic toil
More wide, nor only blends the breathing oil;
But calls the lineaments of life complete
From genial alchymy's creative heat;
Obedient forms to the bright fusion gives,
While in the warm enamel Nature lives.

Reynolds, 'tis thine, from the broad window's height,
To add new lustre to religious light:
Not of its pomp to strip this ancient shrine,
But bid that pomp with purer radiance shine:
With arts unknown before, to reconcile
The willing Graces to the Gothic pile.

 We're talking different kinds of vulnerability here.

These icicles aren't going to last for ever 

Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun.

But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning,

And the famous American sculptor 

Who scrambles the world with his tripod

For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them. 

It's not comfortable, a double helix of opalescent fire 

* 

Wrapping round you, swishing your bark

Down cotton you can't see,

On which a sculptor planned his icicles, 

Working all day for that Mesopotamian magic

Of last light before the dark

In a suspended helter-skelter, lit

By almost horizontal rays

Making a mist-carousel from the House of Diamond,

*

A spiral of Pepsodent darkening to the shadowfrost

Of cedars at the Great Gate of Kiev.

Why it makes me think of opening the door to you

I can't imagine. No one could be less

Of an icicle. But there it is -

Having put me down in felt-tip

In the mystical appointment book, 

You shoot that quick

*

Inquiry-glance, head tilted, when I open up,

Like coming in's another country,

A country you want but have to get used to, hot 

From your bal masqu?, making sure 

That what you found before's

Still here: a spiral of touch and go,

Lightning licking a tree

Imagining itself Aretha Franklin

*
Singing "You make me feel like a natural woman" 

In basso profondo,

Firing the bark with its otherworld ice

The way you fire, lifting me 

Off my own floor, legs furled 

Round your trunk as that tree goes up 

At an angle inside the lightning, roots in

The orange and silver of Dumfries.

*

Now I'm the lightning now you, you are,

As you pour yourself round me 

Entirely. No who's doing what and to who,

Just a tangle of spiral and tree.

You might wonder about sculptors who come all this way 

To make a mad thing that won't last.

You know how it is: you spend a day, a whole life.

Then the light's gone, you walk away 

*

To the Galloway Paradise Hotel. Pine-logs,

Cutlery, champagne - OK, 

But the important thing was making it.

Hours, and you don't know how it'll be. 

Then something like light

Arrives last moment, at speed reckoned 

Only by horizons: completing, surprising 

With its three hundred thousand 

*

Kilometres per second. Still, even lightning has its moments of panic.

You don't get icicles catching the midwinter sun 

In a perfect double helix in Dumfriesshire every day. 

And can they be good for each other,

Lightning and tree? It'd make anyone,

Wouldn't it, afraid? That rowan would adore

To sleep and wake up in your arms 

*

But's scared of getting burnt. And the lightning might ask, touching wood,

"What do you want of me, now we're in the same 

Atomic chain?" What can the tree say?

"Being the centre of all that you are to yourself -

That'd be OK. Being my own body's fine

But it needs yours to stay that way."

No one could live for ever in 

*

A suspended gleam-on-the-edge,

As if sky might tear any minute. Or not for ever for long. Those icicles

Won't be surprise any more. The little snapped threads 

Blew away. Glamour left that hill in Dumfries.

The sculptor went off with his black equipment. 

Adzes, twine, leather gloves.

*

What's left is a photo of

A completely solitary sight

In a book anyone might open. 

But whether our touch at the door gets forgotten

Or turned into other sights, light, form, 

I hope you'll be truthful

To me. At least as truthful as lightning,

Skinning a tree.



THIS POEM WON THE 1996 National Poetry Prize

 In the glad revels, in the happy fetes, 
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled 
With the sweet wine of France that concentrates 
The sunshine and the beauty of the world, 

Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread 
The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth, 
To those whose blood, in pious duty shed, 
Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth. 

Here, by devoted comrades laid away, 
Along our lines they slumber where they fell, 
Beside the crater at the Ferme d'Alger 
And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle, 

And round the city whose cathedral towers 
The enemies of Beauty dared profane, 
And in the mat of multicolored flowers 
That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne. 

Under the little crosses where they rise 
The soldier rests. Now round him undismayed 
The cannon thunders, and at night he lies 
At peace beneath the eternal fusillade. . . . 

That other generations might possess -- - 
From shame and menace free in years to come -- - 
A richer heritage of happiness, 
He marched to that heroic martyrdom. 

Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid 
Than undishonored that his flag might float 
Over the towers of liberty, he made 
His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat. 

Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb, 
Bare of the sculptor's art, the poet's lines, 
Summer shall flush with poppy-fields in bloom, 
And Autumn yellow with maturing vines. 

There the grape-pickers at their harvesting 
Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays, 
Blessing his memory as they toil and sing 
In the slant sunshine of October days. . . . 

I love to think that if my blood should be 
So privileged to sink where his has sunk, 
I shall not pass from Earth entirely, 
But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk, 

And faces that the joys of living fill 
Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer, 
In beaming cups some spark of me shall still 
Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear. 

So shall one coveting no higher plane 
Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone, 
Even from the grave put upward to attain 
The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known; 

And that strong need that strove unsatisfied 
Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore, 
Not death itself shall utterly divide 
From the belovèd shapes it thirsted for. 

Alas, how many an adept for whose arms 
Life held delicious offerings perished here, 
How many in the prime of all that charms, 
Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear! 

Honor them not so much with tears and flowers, 
But you with whom the sweet fulfilment lies, 
Where in the anguish of atrocious hours 
Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes, 

Rather when music on bright gatherings lays 
Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost, 
Be mindful of the men they were, and raise 
Your glasses to them in one silent toast. 

Drink to them -- - amorous of dear Earth as well, 
They asked no tribute lovelier than this -- - 
And in the wine that ripened where they fell, 
Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.

 Among these latter busts we count by scores,
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,
Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,
Loricand low-browed Gorgon on the breast,---
One loves a baby face, with violets there,
Violets instead of laurel in the hair,
As those were all the little locks could bear.

Now read here. ``Protus ends a period
``Of empery beginning with a god;
``Born in the porphyry chamber at Byzant,
``Queens by his cradle, proud and ministrant:
``And if he quickened breath there, 'twould like fire
``Pantingly through the dim vast realm transpire.
``A fame that he was missing spread afar:
``The world from its four corners, rose in war,
``Till he was borne out on a balcony
``To pacify the world when it should see.
``The captains ranged before him, one, his hand
``Made baby points at, gained the chief command.
``And day by day more beautiful he grew
``In shape, all said, in feature and in hue,
``While young Greek sculptors, gazing on the child,
``Because with old Greek sculptore reconciled.
``Already sages laboured to condense
``In easy tomes a life's experience:
``And artists took grave counsel to impart
``In one breath and one hand-sweep, all their art---
``To make his graces prompt as blossoming
``Of plentifully-watered palms in spring:
``Since well beseems it, whoso mounts the throne,
``For beauty, knowledge, strength, should stand alone,
``And mortals love the letters of his name.''

---Stop! Have you turned two pages? Still the same.
New reign, same date. The scribe goes on to say
How that same year, on such a month and day,
``John the Pannonian, groundedly believed
``A Blacksmith's bastard, whose hard hand reprieved
``The Empire from its fate the year before,---
``Came, had a mind to take the crown, and wore
``The same for six years (during which the Huns
``Kept off their fingers from us), till his sons
``Put something in his liquor''---and so forth.
Then a new reign. Stay---``Take at its just worth''
(Subjoins an annotator) ``what I give
``As hearsay. Some think, John let Protus live
``And slip away. 'Tis said, he reached man's age
``At some blind northern court; made, first a page,
``Then tutor to the children; last, of use
``About the hunting-stables. I deduce
``He wrote the little tract `On worming dogs,'
``Whereof the name in sundry catalogues
``Is extant yet. A Protus of the race
``Is rumoured to have died a monk in Thrace,---
``And if the same, he reached senility.''

Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!

 SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.. . .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

 Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews -- sons mine -- ah God, I know not! Well --
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What's done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world's a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
"Do I live, am I dead?" Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
-- Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the very dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh poured red wine of a mighty pulse
-- Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
-- What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find -- Ah God, I know not, I! --
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father's globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black --
'Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me.
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,
And Moses with the tables -- but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me -- all of jasper, then!
'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world --
And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
-- That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line --
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor's work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet,
-- Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick,
They glitter like your mother's for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a visor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
"Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death -- ye wish it -- God, ye wish it! Stone --
Gritstone, a crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through --
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
-- Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers --
Old Gandolf -- at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

 BEAUTY, the attribute of Heaven! 
In various forms to mortals given, 
With magic skill enslaves mankind, 
As sportive fancy sways the mind. 
Search the wide world, go where you will, 
VARIETY pursues you still; 
Capricious Nature knows no bound, 
Her unexhausted gifts are found 
In ev'ry clime, in ev'ry face, 
Each has its own peculiar grace. 

To GALLIA's frolic scenes repair, 
There reigns the tyny DEBONAIRE; 
The mincing step­the slender waist, 
The lip with bright vermilion grac'd: 
The short pert nose­the pearly teeth, 
With the small dimpled chin beneath,­ 
The social converse, gay and free, 
The smart BON-MOT and REPARTEE. 

ITALIA boasts the melting fair, 
The pointed step, the haughty air, 
Th' empassion'd tone, the languid eye, 
The song of thrilling harmony; 
Insidious LOVE conceal'd in smiles 
That charms­and as it charms beguiles. 

View GRECIAN MAIDS, whose finish'd forms 
The wond'ring sculptor's fancy warms! 
There let thy ravish'd eye behold 
The softest gems of Nature's mould;
Each charm, that REYNOLDS learnt to trace, 
From SHERIDAN's bewitching face. 

Imperious TURKEY's pride is seen
In Beauty's rich luxuriant mien; 
The dark and sparkling orbs that glow 
Beneath a polish'd front of snow: 
The auburn curl that zephyr blows 
About the cheek of brightest rose: 
The shorten'd zone, the swelling breast, 
With costly gems profusely drest; 
Reclin'd in softly-waving bow'rs, 
On painted beds of fragrant flow'rs;
Where od'rous canopies dispense 
ARABIA's spices to the sense; 
Where listless indolence and ease, 
Proclaim the sov'reign wish, to please. 
'Tis thus, capricious FANCY shows 
How far her frolic empire goes ! 

On ASIA's sands, on ALPINE snow, 
We trace her steps where'er we go; 
The BRITISH Maid with timid grace; 
The tawny INDIAN 's varnish'd face; 
The jetty AFRICAN; the fair 
Nurs'd by EUROPA's softer air; 
With various charms delight the mind, 
For FANCY governs ALL MANKIND.