To paint in mystic colours Sound and Thought. 
        With Wisdom’s voice to print the page sublime,
        And mark in adamant the steps of Time. 
        —­Three favour’d youths her soft attention share,
120 The fond disciples of the studious Fair,

[About twenty letters, ten cyphers, and seven crotches, represent by their numerous combinations all our ideas and sensations! the musical characters are probably arrived at their perfection, unless emphasis, and tone, and swell could be expressed, as well as note and time.  Charles the Twelfth of Sweden had a design to have introduced a numeration by squares, instead of by decimation, which might have served the purposes of philosophy better than the present mode, which is said to be of Arabic invention.  The alphabet is yet in a very imperfect state; perhaps seventeen letters could express all the simple sounds in the European languages.  In China they have not yet learned to divide their words into syllables, and are thence necessitated to employ many thousand characters; it is said above eighty thousand.  It is to be wished, in this ingenious age, that the European nations would accord to reform our alphabet.]

        Hear her sweet voice, the golden process prove;
        Gaze, as they learn; and, as they listen, love.
        The first from Alpha to Omega joins
        The letter’d tribes along the level lines;
125 Weighs with nice ear the vowel, liquid, surd,
        And breaks in syllables the volant word. 
        Then forms the next upon the marshal’d plain
        In deepening ranks his dexterous cypher-train;
        And counts, as wheel the decimating bands,
130 The dews of AEgypt, or Arabia’s sands,
        And then the third on four concordant lines
        Prints the lone crotchet, and the quaver joins;
        Marks the gay trill, the solemn pause inscribes,
        And parts with bars the undulating tribes.
135 Pleased round her cane-wove throne, the applauding crowd
        Clap’d their rude hands, their swarthy foreheads bow’d;
        With loud acclaim “a present God!” they cry’d,
        “A present God!” rebellowing shores reply’d—­
        Then peal’d at intervals with mingled swell
140 The echoing harp, shrill clarion, horn, and shell;
        While Bards ecstatic, bending o’er the lyre,
        Struck deeper chords, and wing’d the song with fire. 
        Then mark’d Astronomers with keener eyes
        The Moon’s refulgent journey through the skies;
145 Watch’d the swift Comets urge their blazing cars,
        And weigh’d the Sun with his revolving Stars. 
        High raised the Chemists their Hermetic wands,
        (And changing forms obey’d their waving hands,)
        Her treasur’d gold from Earth’s deep chambers tore,
150 Or fused and harden’d her chalybeate ore. 
        All with bent knee from fair PAPYRA claim
        Wove by her hands the wreath of deathless fame. 
        —­Exulting Genius crown’d his darling child,
        The young Arts clasp’d her knees, and Virtue smiled.