- And in whose strains your praises shall endure,
-
While to Sabrina1 speeds your healing stream. [380]
- BRISTOL, without thy marble,2 by the flame
- Calcin’d to whiteness, vain the stately reed
- Would swell with juice mellifluent; heat would soon
- The strongest, best-hung furnaces, consume.
- Without its aid the cool-imprison’d stream, [385]
- Seldom allow’d to view the face of day,
- Tho’ late it roam’d a denizen of air;
- Would steal from its involuntary bounds,
- And, by sly windings, set itself at large.
- But chief thy lime the experienc’d boiler loves, [390]
- Nor loves ill-founded; when no other art
- Can bribe to union the coy floating salts,
- A proper portion of this precious dust,
- Cast in the wave, (so showers alone of gold
- Could win fair Danae3 to the God’s embrace;) [395]
- With nectar’d muscovado soon will charge
- Thy shelving coolers, which, severely press’d
- Between the fingers, not resolves; and which
- Rings in the cask; and or a light-brown hue,
- Or thine, more precious silvery-grey, assumes. [400]
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A poetic name for the River Severn, which is Britain’s longest river and empties into the Bristol Channel. ↩︎
-
A metamorphic rock formed by applying great heat and pressure to limestone. ↩︎
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Daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Queen Eurydice, also mother of Perseus by Zeus, who impregnated Danae in the form of a shower of gold. ↩︎