Sorry, Tony...
All I can find is hundreds of references to the Sting lyric, interspersed with hundreds of others using the same line more or less the way you did.
The online version of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, at Bartleby.com, has nothing.
I also found a page in a discussion group where someone asked the same question, and no one found any more than I did.
I suspect it comes from some lost Victorian romantic ballad, the kind sung in parlors, with piano accompaniment, on genteel social occasions... or from a work of fiction of the same era. I don't know why I suspect that -- it just sounds floridly dramatic enough for the mid-to-late 1800s. I learned it from my parents, and have used it for years before Sting did... usually when a pretty girl goes by. ;-)
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