From Time’s remotest dawn where China brings
        In proud succession all her Patriot-Kings;
105 O’er desert-sands, deep gulfs, and hills sublime,
        Extends her massy wall from clime to clime;
        With bells and dragons crests her Pagod-bowers,
        Her silken palaces, and porcelain towers;
        With long canals a thousand nations laves;
110 Plants all her wilds, and peoples all her waves;
        Slow treads fair CANNABIS the breezy strand,
        The distaff streams dishevell’d in her hand;

[Cannabis. l. 111.  Chinese Hemp.  Two houses.  Five males.  A new species of hemp, of which an account is given by K. Fitzgerald, Esq. in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, and which is believed to be much superior to the hemp of other countries.  A few seeds of this plant were sown in England on the 4th of June, and grew to fourteen feet seven inches in height by the middle of October; they were nearly seven inches in circumference, and bore many lateral branches, and produced very white and tough fibres.  At some parts of the time these plants grew nearly eleven inches in a week.  Philos.  Trans.  Vol.  LXXII. p. 46.]

        Now to the left her ivory neck inclines,
        And leads in Paphian curves its azure lines;
115 Dark waves the fringed lid, the warm cheek glows,
        And the fair ear the parting locks disclose;
        Now to the right with airy sweep she bends,
        Quick join the threads, the dancing spole depends.
        —­Five Swains attracted guard the Nymph, by turns
120 Her grace inchants them, and her beauty burns;
        To each She bows with sweet assuasive smile,
        Hears his soft vows, and turns her spole the while.

        So when with light and shade, concordant strife! 
        Stern CLOTHO weaves the chequer’d thread of life;
125 Hour after hour the growing line extends,
        The cradle and the coffin bound its ends;

[Paphian curves. l. 114.  In his ingenious work, entitled, The Analysis of Beauty, Mr. Hogarth believes that the triangular glass, which was dedicated to Venus in her temple at Paphos, contained in it a line bending spirally round a cone with a certain degree of curviture; and that this pyramidal outline and serpentine curve constitute the principles of Grace and Beauty.]

       Soft cords of silk the whirling spoles reveal,
        If smiling Fortune turn the giddy wheel;
        But if sweet Love with baby-fingers twines,
130 And wets with dewy lips the lengthening lines,
        Skein after skein celestial tints unfold,
        And all the silken tissue shines with gold.

        Warm with sweet blushes bright GALANTHA glows,
        And prints with frolic step the melting snows;

[Galanthus. l. 133.  Nivalis.  Snowdrop.  Six males, one female.  The first flower that appears after the winter solstice.  See Stillingfleet’s Calendar of Flora.