Lavinia

The lovely young Lavinia once had friends;

And fortune smiled deceitful on her birth:

For, in her helpless years deprived of all,

Of every stay, save innocence and Heaven,

She, with her widow'd mother, feeble, old,

And poor, lived in a cottage, far

Among the windings of a woody vale;

By solitude and deep-surrounding shades,

But more by bashful modesty, conceal'd.

Together thus they shunn'd the cruel

Which virtue, sunk to poverty, would

From giddy passion and low-minded pride;

Almost on Nature's common bounty fed,

Like the gay birds that sung them to repose,

Content, and careless of to-morrow's fare.

Her form was fresher than the morning rose,

When the dew wets its leaves; unstain'd and pure,

As is the lily or the mountain snow.

The modest virtues mingled in her eyes,

Still on the ground dejected, darting

Their humid means into the blooming flowers;

Or when the mournful tale her mother

Of what her faithless fortune promised once,

Thrill'd in her thought, they like the dewy

Of evening, shone in tears.

A native

Sat fair-proportion'd on her polish'd limbs,

Veil'd in a simple robe, their best attire,

Beyond the pomp of dress; for

Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,

But is, when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most.

Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self,

Recluse amid the close-embowering woods:

As in the hollow breast of Apennine,

Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,

A myrtle rises, far from human eye,

And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;

So flourish'd, blooming, and unseen by all,

The sweet Lavinia.