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Of innocence, of faith, of purity, Our wonted ornaments now soiled and stained, And in our faces evident the signs Of foul concupiscence; whence evil store; Even shame, the last of evils; of the first Be sure then. How shall I behold the face Henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy And rapture so oft beheld? Those heavenly shapes Will dazzle now this earthly, with their blaze Insufferably bright. O! might I here In solitude live savage, in some glade Obscured, where highest woods, impenetrable To star or sun light, spread their umbrage broad And brown as evening! Cover me, ye pines! Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs Hide me, where I may never see them more! But let us now, in bad plight, devise What best may, for the present, serve to hide The parts of each from other, that seem most To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen. Some tree, whose broad smooth leaves, together sewed, And girded on our loins, may cover round Those middle parts; that this new-comer, Shame, There sit not, and reproach us as unclean.

So counselled he, and both together went

Into the thickest wood; there soon they chose

The fig-tree, not that kind for fruit renowned,

But such as, at this day, to Indians known,

In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms,

Branching so broad and long, that in the ground

The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow

About the mother-tree, a pillared shade,

High over-arched, and echoing walks between;

There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,

Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds

At loop-holes cut through thickest shade. Those leaves