Ariste

Let ancient stories round the painter's art,

Who stole from many a maid his Venus' charms,

Till warm devotion fired each gazer's heart

And every bosom bounded with alarms.

He culled the beauties of his native isle,

From some the blush of beauty's vermeil dyes,

From some the lovely look, the winning smile,

From some the languid lustre of the eyes.

Low to the finished form the nations round

In adoration bent the pious knee;

With myrtle wreaths the artist's brow they crowned,

Whose skill, Ariste, only imaged thee.

Ill-fated artist, doomed so wide to seek

The charms that blossom on Ariste's cheek!

Robert Southey

Robert Southey, (born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland), English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic movement. He was endlessly curious about human nature but would not face it, whether in others or himself, except in the less volatile form of human culture, most of which he ended up despising as immoral or irrational, seditious or superstitious, dirty or even diabolical. His own mind eventually failed, after a lifetime of repressed passion and herculean compensatory labor, and he died of a stroke on the vernal equinox of 1843. He was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard in Keswick, alongside his first wife and three of his children.

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Ariste

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