otary up the winding steep;
Ten thousand piers, now join'd and now aloof,
Bear on their branching arms the fretted roof.

Unnumber'd ailes connect unnumber'd halls,
And sacred symbols crowd the pictur'd walls;
With pencil rude forgotten days design,
And arts, or empires, live in every line.
While chain'd reluctant on the marble ground,
Indignant TIME reclines, by Sculpture bound; 80
And sternly bending o'er a scroll unroll'd,
Inscribes the future with his style of gold.
--So erst, when PROTEUS on the briny shore,
New forms assum'd of eagle, pard, or boar;
The wise ATRIDES bound in sea-weed thongs
The changeful god amid his scaly throngs;
Till in deep tones his opening lips at last
Reluctant told the future and the past.

[Footnote: _Pictur'd walls_, l. 76. The application of
mankind, in the early ages of society, to the imitative arts
of painting, carving, statuary, and the casting of figures in
metals, seems to have preceded the discovery of letters; and
to have been used as a written language to convey
intelligence to their distant friends, or to transmit to
posterity the history of themselves, or of their discoveries.
Hence the origin of the hieroglyphic figures which crowded
the walls of the temples of antiquity; many of which may be
seen in the tablet of Isis in the works of Montfaucon; and
some of them are still used in the sciences of chemistry and
astronomy, as the characters for the metals and planets, and
the figures of animals on the celestial globe.]

[Footnote: _So erst, when Proteus_, l. 83. It seems probable
that Proteus was the name of a hieroglyphic figure
representing Time; whose form was perpetually changing, and
who could discover the past events of the world, and predict
the future. Herodotus does not doubt but that Proteus was an
Egyptian king or deity; and Orpheus calls him the principle
of all things, and the most ancient of the gods; and adds,
that he keeps the keys of Nature, _Danet's Dict._, all which
might well accord with a figure representing Time.]

HERE o'er piazza'd courts, and long arcades,
The bowers of PLEASURE root their waving shades; 90
Shed o'er the pansied moss a checker'd gloom,
Bend with new fr