Feel'st thou not the loaded sky?
Read thy danger, King, and fly.

Lo, yon' castle banners glare
Bloody through the troubled air;
Lo, what spectres on the roofs
Frowning bid thee stand aloof!

Murder, like an eagle waits
Perch'd above the gloomy gates,
Just in act to pounce his prey ;
Come not near

-away! away!

Let not plighted faith beguile ; Honour's semblance, Beauty's smile : Fierce Ambition's venom'd dart Rankles in the fest'ring heart.

Treason, arm’d against thy life,
Points his dagger, whets his knife,
Drugs his stupifying bowl,
Steels his unrelenting soul,

Now 'tis time; ere guilty night Closes round thee, speed thy flight. If the threshold once be crost, Duncan! thou’rt for ever lost,

On he goes I resistless Fate Hastes to fill his mortal date : Cease, ye warnings, vain tho' true. Murder'd King, adieu! adieu!

NOTES ON ODES

OF THE

FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD CLASS.

NOTES ON ODES OF THE FIRST CLASS.

ODE XL.

Page 8. THE Attic sage exhausts the bowl,] Socrates, who was condemned to die by poison.

9. See there the injured Poet bleed !] Seneca, born at Corduba, who, according to Pliny, was orator, poet, and philosopher. He bled to death in the bath.

ib. Lo! there the wild Assyrian queen,] Semiramis, cum ei circa cultum capitis sui occupatae nunciatum esset Babylonem defecisse; altera parte crinium adhuc soluta protinus ad eam expugnandam cucurrit: nec prius decorem capillorum in ordinem quam tantam urbem in potestatem suam redegit : quocirca statua ejus Babylone posita est, &c. Val. Max. de Ira.

Absorb'd in thought, great Newton stands ;] A noble statue of Sir Isaac Newton, erected in Trinity-College chapel by Dr. Smith,

ODE XLIII.

Page 18. O'er Helicon my bleating lambs I guard,] Hesiod is said to have led the life of a shepherd on mount Helicon, where, as he relates in his Theogony, the Muses appeared to him, and adopted him in their service. V. 24.

19. For thee, sole glory of thy abjeéł race,] Pindar, whose birth the nymphs and Pan are said to have solemnized with dances: we are likewise told, that in his infancy the bees fed him with their honey. He was born at Thebes, the capital of Beotia, a province remarkable for the dulness of its inhabitants, of which he himself takes notice in his Olympics. ib. Oft fir'd with Bacchanalian

rage, The father of the Grecian stage

In terror clad annoys my rest ; ] Aeschylus, who was reported never to have wrote but when inspir’d by wine : he had a particular genius for terrifying the audience; of which the Chorus of Furies in his Eumenides is a remarkable and well known instance. He was buried near the river Gela, where the tragedians performed dramas at his tomb. ib. With longing taste, with eager lip,

In raptur’d visions oft / sip

The honey of the tragic bee; ] Sophocles, who, it is said, was able to check the fury of the winds and sea. Philostratus de Vita Apollonii Tyanei, lib. viii. P. 393.