Chapter 10

As when a traveller, a long day pastIn painful search of what he cannot find,At night’s approach, content with the next cot,There ruminates, a while, his labour lost;Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,Till the due season calls him to repose:Thus I, long-travell’d in the ways of men,And dancing, with the rest, the giddy maze,Where Disappointment smiles at Hope’s career;10Warn’d by the languor of life’s evening ray,At length have housed me in an humble shed;Where, future wandering banish’d from my thought,And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,I chase the moments with a serious song.Song soothes our pains; and age has pains to soothe.When age, care, crime, and friends embraced at heart,Torn from my bleeding breast, and death’s dark shade,Which hovers o’er me, quench th’ ethereal fire;Canst thou, O Night! indulge one labour more?20One labour more indulge! then sleep, my strain!21Till, haply, waked by Raphael’s golden lyre,Where night, death, age, care, crime, and sorrow, cease;To bear a part in everlasting lays;Though far, far higher set, in aim, I trust,Symphonious to this humble prelude here.Has not the Muse asserted pleasures pure,Like those above; exploding other joys?Weigh what was urged, Lorenzo! fairly weigh;And tell me, hast thou cause to triumph still?30I think, thou wilt forbear a boast so bold.But if, beneath the favour of mistake,Thy smile’s sincere; not more sincere can beLorenzo’s smile, than my compassion for him.The sick in body call for aid; the sickIn mind are covetous of more disease;And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well.To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure.When Nature’s blush by Custom is wiped off,And Conscience, deaden’d by repeated strokes,40Has into manners naturalized our crimes;The curse of curses is, our curse to love;To triumph in the blackness of our guilt(As Indians glory in the deepest jet),And throw aside our senses with our peace.But grant no guilt, no shame, no least alloy;Grant joy and glory quite unsullied shone;Yet, still, it ill deserves Lorenzo’s heart.No joy, no glory, glitters in thy sight,But, through the thin partition of an hour,50I see its sables wove by destiny;And that in sorrow buried; this, in shame;While howling furies wring the doleful knell;And Conscience, now so soft thou scarce canst hear54Her whisper, echoes her eternal peal.Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?How many sleep, who kept the world awakeWith lustre, and with noise! has Death proclaim’dA truce, and hung his sated lance on high?’Tis brandish’d still; nor shall the present yearBe more tenacious of her human leaf,62Or spread of feeble life a thinner fall.But needless monuments to wake the thought;Life’s gayest scenes speak man’s mortality;Though in a style more florid, full as plain,As mausoleums, pyramids, and tombs.What are our noblest ornaments, but deathsTurn’d flatterers of life, in paint, or marble,The well-stain’d canvas, or the featured stone?70Our fathers grace, or rather haunt, the scene.Joy peoples her pavilion from the dead.“Profess’d diversions! cannot these escape?”Far from it: these present us with a shroud;And talk of death, like garlands o’er a grave.As some bold plunderers, for buried wealth,We ransack tombs for pastime; from the dustCall up the sleeping hero; bid him treadThe scene for our amusement: how like godsWe sit; and, wrapt in immortality,80Shed generous tears on wretches born to die;Their fate deploring, to forget our own!What all the pomps and triumphs of our lives,But legacies in blossom? Our lean soil,Luxuriant grown, and rank in vanities,From friends interr’d beneath; a rich manure!Like other worms, we banquet on the dead;Like other worms, shall we crawl on, nor know88Our present frailties, or approaching fate?Lorenzo! such the glories of the world!What is the world itself? thy world—a grave.Where is the dust that has not been alive?The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;From human mould we reap our daily bread.The globe around earth’s hollow surface shakes,And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.O’er devastation we blind revels keep;Whole buried towns support the dancer’s heel.The moist of human frame the sun exhales;Winds scatter through the mighty void the dry;100Earth repossesses part of what she gave,And the freed spirit mounts on wings of fire;Each element partakes our scatter’d spoils;As nature, wide, our ruins spread: man’s deathInhabits all things, but the thought of man.Nor man alone; his breathing bust expires,His tomb is mortal; empires die: where, now,The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty name!Yet few regard them in this useful light;Though half our learning is their epitaph.110When down thy vale, unlock’d by midnight thought,That loves to wander in thy sunless realms,O Death! I stretch my view: what visions rise!What triumphs! toils imperial! arts divine!In wither’d laurels glide before my sight!What lengths of far-famed ages, billow’d highWith human agitation, roll alongIn unsubstantial images of air!The melancholy ghosts of dead renown,Whispering faint echoes of the world’s applause,120With penitential aspect, as they pass,All point at earth, and hiss at human pride,122The wisdom of the wise, and prancings of the great.But, O Lorenzo! far the rest above,Of ghastly nature, and enormous size,One form assaults my sight, and chills my blood,And shakes my frame. Of one departed world[52]I see the mighty shadow: oozy wreathAnd dismal seaweed crown her; o’er her urnReclined, she weeps her desolated realms,130And bloated sons; and, weeping, prophesiesAnother’s dissolution, soon, in flames.But, like Cassandra, prophesies in vain;In vain, to many; not, I trust, to thee.For, know’st thou not, or art thou loath to know,The great decree, the counsel of the skies?Deluge and conflagration, dreadful powers!Prime ministers of vengeance! chain’d in cavesDistinct, apart the giant furies roar;Apart; or, such their horrid rage for ruin,140In mutual conflict would they rise, and wageEternal war, till one was quite devour’d.But not for this, ordain’d their boundless rage;When Heaven’s inferior instruments of wrath,War, famine, pestilence, are found too weakTo scourge a world for her enormous crimes,These are let loose, alternate: down they rush,Swift and tempestuous, from th’ eternal throne,With irresistible commission arm’d,The world, in vain corrected, to destroy,150And ease creation of the shocking scene.Seest thou, Lorenzo! what depends on man?The fate of Nature; as for man, her birth.Earth’s actors change earth’s transitory scenes,And make creation groan with human guilt.155How must it groan, in a new deluge whelm’d,But not of waters! At the destined hour,By the loud trumpet summon’d to the charge,See, all the formidable sons of fire,Eruptions, earthquakes, comets, lightnings, playTheir various engines; all at once disgorgeTheir blazing magazines; and take, by storm,162This poor terrestrial citadel of man.Amazing period! when each mountain-heightOutburns Vesuvius; rocks eternal pourTheir melted mass, as rivers once they pour’d;Stars rush; and final Ruin fiercely drivesHer ploughshare o’er creation!—while aloft,More than astonishment! if more can be!Far other firmament than e’er was seen,170Than e’er was thought by man! far other stars!Stars animate, that govern these of fire;Far other sun!—A sun, O how unlikeThe Babe at Bethlehem! how unlike the Man,That groan’d on Calvary!—Yet He it is;That Man of Sorrows! O how changed! what pomp!In grandeur terrible, all heaven descends!And gods, ambitious, triumph in his train.A swift archangel, with his golden wing,As blots and clouds, that darken and disgrace180The scene divine, sweeps stars and suns aside.And now, all dross removed, heaven’s own pure day,Full on the confines of our ether, flames:While (dreadful contrast!) far, how far beneath!Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,And storms sulphureous; her voracious jawsExpanding wide, and roaring for her prey.Lorenzo! welcome to this scene; the lastIn nature’s course; the first in wisdom’s thought.189This strikes, if aught can strike thee; this awakesThe most supine; this snatches man from death.Rouse, rouse, Lorenzo, then, and follow me,Where truth, the most momentous man can hear,Loud calls my soul, and ardour wings her flight.I find my inspiration in my theme:The grandeur of my subject is my Muse.At midnight, when mankind is wrapt in peace,And worldly fancy feeds on golden dreams;To give more dread to man’s most dreadful hour.At midnight, ’tis presumed, this pomp will burst200From tenfold darkness; sudden as the sparkFrom smitten steel; from nitrous grain, the blaze.Man, starting from his couch, shall sleep no more!The day is broke, which never more shall close!Above, around, beneath, amazement all!Terror and glory join’d in their extremes!Our God in grandeur, and our world on fire!All nature struggling in the pangs of death!Dost thou not hear her? Dost thou not deploreHer strong convulsions, and her final groan?210Where are we now? Ah me! the ground is gone,On which we stood; Lorenzo! while thou may’st,Provide more firm support, or sink for ever!Where? how? from whence? Vain hope! it is too late!Where, where, for shelter, shall the guilty fly,When consternation turns the good man pale?Great day! for which all other days were made;For which earth rose from chaos, man from earth;And an eternity, the date of gods,Descended on poor earth-created man!220Great day of dread, decision, and despair!At thought of thee, each sublunary wishLets go its eager grasp, and drops the world;223And catches at each reed of hope in heaven.At thought of thee!—And art thou absent then?Lorenzo! no; ’tis here; it is begun;—Already is begun the grand assize,In thee, in all: deputed Conscience scalesThe dread tribunal, and forestalls our doom;Forestalls; and, by forestalling, proves it sure.230Why on himself should man void judgment pass?Is idle Nature laughing at her sons?Who Conscience sent, her sentence will support,And God above assert that God in man.Thrice happy they that enter now the courtHeaven opens in their bosoms! but, how rare,Ah me! that magnanimity, how rare!What hero, like the man who stands himself;Who dares to meet his naked heart alone;Who bears, intrepid, the full charge it brings,240Resolved to silence future murmurs there?The coward flies; and, flying, is undone.(Art thou a coward? No.) The coward flies;Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know;Asks, “What is truth?” with Pilate; and retires;Dissolves the court, and mingles with the throng;Asylum sad! from reason, hope, and heaven!Shall all, but man look out with ardent eye,For that great day, which was ordain’d for man?O day of consummation! mark supreme250(If men are wise) of human thought! nor least,Or in the sight of angels, or their King!Angels, whose radiant circles, height o’er height,Order o’er order, rising, blaze o’er blaze,As in a theatre, surround this scene,Intent on man, and anxious for his fate.Angels look out for thee; for thee, their Lord,257To vindicate his glory; and for thee,Creation universal calls aloud,To disinvolve the moral world, and giveTo Nature’s renovation brighter charms.Shall man alone, whose fate, whose final fateHangs on that hour, exclude it from his thought?I think of nothing else; I see! I feel it!All nature, like an earthquake, trembling round!All deities, like summer’s swarms, on wing!All basking in the full meridian blaze!I see the Judge enthroned! the flaming guard!The volume open’d! open’d every heart!A sunbeam pointing out each secret thought!270No patron! intercessor none! now pastThe sweet, the clement, mediatorial hour!For guilt no plea! to pain, no pause! no bound!Inexorable, all! and all, extreme!Nor man alone; the Foe of God and man,From his dark den, blaspheming, drags his chain,And rears his brazen front, with thunder scarr’d:Receives his sentence, and begins his hell.All vengeance past, now, seems abundant grace:Like meteors in a stormy sky, how roll280His baleful eyes! he curses whom he dreads;And deems it the first moment of his fall.’Tis present to my thought!—and yet where is it?Angels can’t tell me; angels cannot guessThe period; from created beings lock’dIn darkness. But the process, and the place,Are less obscure; for these may man inquire.Say, thou great close of human hopes and fears!Great key of hearts! great finisher of fates!Great end! and great beginning! say, Where art thou?Art thou in time, or in eternity?291Nor in eternity, nor time, I find thee.These, as two monarchs, on their borders meet,(Monarchs of all elapsed, or unarrived!)As in debate, how best their powers allied,May swell the grandeur, or discharge the wrath,Of Him, whom both their monarchies obey.Time, this vast fabric for him built (and doom’dWith him to fall), now bursting o’er his head;His lamp, the sun, extinguish’d; from beneath300The frown of hideous darkness, calls his sonsFrom their long slumber; from earth’s heaving womb,To second birth! contemporary throng!Roused at one call, upstarted from one bed,Press’d in one crowd, appall’d with one amaze,He turns them o’er, Eternity! to thee.Then (as a king deposed disdains to live)He falls on his own scythe; nor falls alone:His greatest foe falls with him; Time, and heWho murder’d all Time’s offspring, Death, expire.310Time was! Eternity now reigns alone:Awful eternity! offended queen!And her resentment to mankind, how just!With kind intent, soliciting access,How often has she knock’d at human hearts!Rich to repay their hospitality;How often call’d! and with the voice of God!Yet bore repulse, excluded as a cheat!A dream! while foulest foes found welcome there!A dream, a cheat, now, all things, but her smile.320For, lo! her twice ten thousand gates thrown wide,As thrice from Indus to the frozen pole,With banners streaming as the comet’s blaze,And clarions, louder than the deep in storms,Sonorous as immortal breath can blow,325Pour forth their myriads, potentates, and powers,Of light, of darkness; in a middle field,Wide, as creation! populous, as wide!A neutral region! there to mark th’ eventOf that great drama, whose preceding scenesDetain’d them close spectators, through a lengthOf ages, ripening to this grand result;332Ages, as yet unnumber’d, but by God;Who now, pronouncing sentence, vindicatesThe rights of Virtue, and his own renown.Eternity, the various sentence past,Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes,Sulphureous, or ambrosial. What ensues?The deed predominant! the deed of deeds!Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven.340The goddess, with determined aspect, turnsHer adamantine key’s enormous sizeThrough destiny’s inextricable wards,Deep driving every bolt, on both their fates.Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,Down, down, she hurls it through the dark profound,Ten thousand thousand fathom; there to rust,And ne’er unlock her resolution more.The deep resounds; and hell, through all her glooms,Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.350O how unlike the chorus of the skies!O how unlike those shouts of joy, that shakeThe whole ethereal! how the concave rings!Nor strange! when deities their voice exalt;And louder far, than when creation rose,To see creation’s godlike aim, and end,So well accomplish’d! so divinely closed!To see the mighty dramatist’s last act,(As meet), in glory rising o’er the rest.359No fancied god, a God indeed, descends,To solve all knots; to strike the moral home;To throw full day on darkest scenes of time;To clear, commend, exalt, and crown the whole.Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise,The charm’d spectators thunder their applause;And the vast void beyond, applause resounds.What then am I?—Amidst applauding worlds,And worlds celestial, is there found on earth,A peevish, dissonant, rebellious string,370Which jars in the grand chorus, and complains?Censure on thee, Lorenzo! I suspend,And turn it on myself; how greatly due!All, all is right; by God ordain’d or done;And who, but God, resumed the friends He gave?And have I been complaining, then, so long?Complaining of his favours; pain, and death?Who, without Pain’s advice, would e’er be good?Who, without Death, but would be good in vain?Pain is to save from pain; all punishment,380To make for peace; and death, to save from Death;And second death, to guard immortal life;To rouse the careless, the presumptuous awe,And turn the tide of souls another way;By the same tenderness divine ordain’d,That planted Eden, and high bloom’d for man,A fairer Eden, endless, in the skies.Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene;Resumes them, to prepare us for the next.All evils natural are moral goods;390All discipline, indulgence, on the whole.None are unhappy: all have cause to smile,But such as to themselves that cause deny.393Our faults are at the bottom of our pains;Error, in act, or judgment, is the sourceOf endless sighs: we sin, or we mistake;And Nature tax, when false opinion stings.Let impious grief be banish’d, joy indulged;But chiefly then, when Grief puts in her claim.Joy from the joyous, frequently betrays,400Oft lives in vanity, and dies in woe.Joy, amidst ills, corroborates, exalts;’Tis joy and conquest; joy, and virtue too.A noble fortitude in ills, delightsHeaven, earth, ourselves; ’tis duty, glory, peace.Affliction is the good man’s shining scene;Prosperity conceals his brightest ray;As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.Heroes in battle, pilots in the storm,And virtue in calamities, admire.410The crown of manhood is a winter-joy;An evergreen, that stands the northern blast,And blossoms in the rigour of our fate.’Tis a prime part of happiness, to knowHow much unhappiness must prove our lot;A part which few possess! I’ll pay life’s tax,Without one rebel murmur, from this hour,Nor think it misery to be a man;Who thinks it is, shall never be a god.Some ills we wish for, when we wish to live.420What spoke proud Passion?—“Wish my being lost?”[53]Presumptuous! blasphemous! absurd! and false!The triumph of my soul is,—that I am;And therefore that I may be—what? Lorenzo!Look inward, and look deep; and deeper still;Unfathomably deep our treasure runs426In golden veins, through all eternity!Ages, and ages, and succeeding stillNew ages, where the phantom of an hour,Which courts each night, dull slumber, for repair,Shall wake, and wonder, and exult, and praise,And fly through infinite, and all unlock;And (if deserved) by Heaven’s redundant love,433Made half adorable itself, adore;And find, in adoration, endless joy!Where thou, not master of a moment here,Frail as the flower, and fleeting as the gale,May’st boast a whole eternity, enrich’dWith all a kind Omnipotence can pour.Since Adam fell, no mortal, uninspired,440Has ever yet conceived, or ever shall,How kind is God, how great (if good) is Man.No man too largely from Heaven’s love can hope,If what is hoped he labours to secure.Ills?—there are none: All-gracious! none from thee;From man full many! numerous is the raceOf blackest ills, and those immortal too,Begot by Madness, on fair Liberty;Heaven’s daughter, hell-debauch’d! her hand aloneUnlocks destruction to the sons of men,450First barr’d by thine: high-wall’d with adamant,Guarded with terrors reaching to this world,And cover’d with the thunders of thy law;Whose threats are mercies, whose injunctions, guides,Assisting, not restraining, Reason’s choice;Whose sanctions, unavoidable resultsFrom nature’s course, indulgently reveal’d;If unreveal’d, more dangerous, nor less sure.Thus, an indulgent father warns his sons,“Do this; fly that”—nor always tells the cause;460Pleased to reward, as duty to his will,A conduct needful to their own repose.Great God of wonders! (if, thy love survey’d,Aught else the name of wonderful retains),What rocks are these, on which to build our trust!Thy ways admit no blemish; none I find;Or this alone—“That none is to be found.”Not one, to soften Censure’s hardy crime;Not one, to palliate peevish Grief’s Complaint,Who, like a demon, murmuring from the dust,470Dares into judgment call her Judge.—Supreme!For all I bless thee; most, for the severe;Her[54]death—my own at hand—the fiery gulf,That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent!It thunders;—but it thunders to preserve;It strengthens what it strikes; its wholesome dreadAverts the dreaded pain; its hideous groansJoin heaven’s sweet hallelujahs in thy praise,Great Source of good alone! how kind in all!In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save.480Thus, in thy world material, Mighty Mind!Not that alone which solaces, and shines,The rough and gloomy, challenges our praise.The winter is as needful as the spring;The thunder, as the sun; a stagnate massOf vapours breeds a pestilential air:Nor more propitious the Favonian[55]breezeTo nature’s health, than purifying storms;The dread volcano ministers to good.Its smother’d flames might undermine the world.490Loud Etnas fulminate in love to man;Comets good omens are, when duly scann’d;492And, in their use, eclipses learn to shine.Man is responsible for ills received;Those we call wretched are a chosen band,Compell’d to refuge in the right, for peace.Amid my list of blessings infinite,Stands this the foremost, “That my heart has bled.”’Tis Heaven’s last effort of good-will to man;When Pain can’t bless, Heaven quits us in despair.500Who fails to grieve, when just occasion calls,Or grieves too much, deserves not to be blest;Inhuman, or effeminate, his heart;Reason absolves the grief, which reason ends.May Heaven ne’er trust my friend with happiness,Till it has taught him how to bear it well,By previous pain; and made it safe to smile!Such smiles are mine, and such may they remain;Nor hazard their extinction, from excess.My change of heart a change of style demands;510The Consolation cancels the Complaint,And makes a convert of my guilty song.As when o’er-labour’d, and inclined to breathe,A panting traveller, some rising ground,Some small ascent, has gain’d, he turns him round,And measures with his eye the various vales,The fields, woods, meads, and rivers, he has pass’d;And, satiate of his journey, thinks of home,Endear’d by distance, nor affects more toil;Thus I, though small, indeed, is that ascent520The Muse has gain’d, review the paths she trod;Various, extensive, beaten but by view;And, conscious of her prudence in repose,Pause; and with pleasure meditate an end,Though still remote; so fruitful is my theme.Through many a field of moral, and divine,526The Muse has stray’d; and much of sorrow seenIn human ways; and much of false and vain;Which none, who travel this bad road, can miss.O’er friends deceased full heartily she wept;Of love divine the wonders she display’d;Proved man immortal; show’d the source of joyThe grand tribunal raised; assign’d the boundsOf human grief: in few, to close the whole,The moral Muse has shadow’d out a sketch,Though not in form, nor with a Raphael-stroke,Of most our weakness needs believe, or do,In this our land of travel, and of hope,For peace on earth, or prospect of the skies.539What then remains? much! much! a mighty debtTo be discharged: these thoughts, O Night! are thine;From thee they came, like lovers’ secret sighs,While others slept. So, Cynthia (poets feign),In shadows veil’d, soft-sliding from her sphere,Her shepherd cheer’d; of her enamour’d less,Than I of thee.—And art thou still unsung,Beneath whose brow, and by whose aid, I sing?Immortal silence! where shall I begin?Where end? or how steal music from the spheres,To soothe their goddess?550O majestic Night!Nature’s great ancestor! Day’s elder-born!And fated to survive the transient sun!By mortals, and immortals, seen with awe!A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,An azure zone thy waist; clouds, in heaven’s loomWrought through varieties of shape and shade,In ample folds of drapery divine,Thy flowing mantle form; and, heaven throughout,Voluminously pour thy pompous train.560Thy gloomy grandeurs (nature’s most august,Inspiring aspect!) claim a grateful verse;And, like a sable curtain starr’d with gold,Drawn o’er my labours past, shall close the scene.And what, O man! so worthy to be sung?What more prepares us for the songs of heaven?Creation, of archangels is the theme!What, to be sung, so needful? What so wellCelestial joys prepare us to sustain?The soul of man, His face design’d to see,570Who gave these wonders to be seen by man,Has here a previous scene of objects great,On which to dwell; to stretch to that expanseOf thought, to rise to that exalted heightOf admiration, to contract that awe,And give her whole capacities that strength,Which best may qualify for final joy.The more our spirits are enlarged on earth,The deeper draught shall they receive of heaven.Heaven’s King! whose face unveil’d consummates bliss;Redundant bliss! which fills that mighty void,581The whole creation leaves in human hearts!Thou, who didst touch the lip of Jesse’s son,Rapt in sweet contemplation of these fires,And set his harp in concert with the spheres;While of thy works material the supremeI dare attempt, assist my daring song.Loose me from earth’s enclosure, from the sun’sContracted circle set my heart at large;Eliminate my spirit, give it range590Through provinces of thought yet unexplored;Teach me, by this stupendous scaffolding,Creation’s golden steps, to climb to Thee.Teach me with Art great Nature to control,594And spread a lustre o’er the shades of Night.Feel I thy kind assent? and shall the sunBe seen at midnight, rising in my song?Lorenzo! come, and warm thee: thou, whose heart,Whose little heart, is moor’d within a nookOf this obscure terrestrial, anchor weigh.Another ocean calls, a nobler port;I am thy pilot, I thy prosperous gale.602Gainful thy voyage through yon azure main;Main, without tempest, pirate, rock, or shore;And whence thou may’st import eternal wealth;And leave to beggar’d minds the pearl and gold.Thy travels dost thou boast o’er foreign realms?Thou stranger to the world! thy tour begin;Thy tour through Nature’s universal orb.Nature delineates her whole chart at large,610On soaring souls, that sail among the spheres;And man how purblind, if unknown the whole!Who circles spacious earth, then travels here,Shall own, he never was from home before!Come, my Prometheus,[56]from thy pointed rockOf false ambition; if unchain’d, we’ll mount;We’ll, innocently, steal celestial fire,And kindle our devotion at the stars;A theft, that shall not chain, but set thee free.Above our atmosphere’s intestine[57]wars,620Rain’s fountain-head, the magazine of hail;Above the northern nests of feather’d snows,The brew of thunders, and the flaming forgeThat forms the crooked lightning; ’bove the cavesWhere infant tempests wait their growing wings,And tune their tender voices to that roar,Which soon, perhaps, shall shake a guilty world;627Above misconstrued omens of the sky,Far-travell’d comets’ calculated blaze;Elance[58]thy thought, and think of more than man.Thy soul, till now, contracted, wither’d, shrunk,Blighted by blasts of earth’s unwholesome air,Will blossom here; spread all her facultiesTo these bright ardours; every power unfold,And rise into sublimities of thought.Stars teach, as well as shine. At Nature’s birth,Thus their commission ran—“Be kind to Man.”Where art thou, poor benighted traveller?The stars will light thee, though the moon should fail.Where art thou, more benighted! more astray!640In ways immoral? The stars call thee back;And, if obey’d their counsel, set thee right.This prospect vast, what is it?—Weigh’d aright,’Tis Nature’s system of divinity,And every student of the Night inspires.’Tis elder Scripture, writ by God’s own hand:Scripture authentic! uncorrupt by man.Lorenzo! with my radius (the rich giftOf thought nocturnal!) I’ll point out to theeIts various lessons; some that may surprise650An un-adept in mysteries of Night;Little, perhaps, expected in her school,Nor thought to grow on planet, or on star.Bulls, lions, scorpions, monsters here we feign;Ourselves more monstrous, not to see what hereExists indeed;—a lecture to mankind.What read we here?—Th’ existence of a God?Yes; and of other beings, man above;Natives of ether! sons of higher climes!And, what may move Lorenzo’s wonder more,660Eternity is written in the skies.661And whose eternity?—Lorenzo! thineMankind’s eternity. Nor Faith alone,Virtue grows here; here springs the sovereign cureOf almost every vice; but chiefly thine;Wrath, Pride, Ambition, and impure Desire.Lorenzo! thou canst wake at midnight too,Though not on morals bent: Ambition, Pleasure!Those tyrants I for thee so lately fought,[59]Afford their harass’d slaves but slender rest.670Thou, to whom midnight is immoral noon,And the sun’s noontide blaze, prime dawn of day;Not by thy climate, but capricious crime,Commencing one of our antipodes!In thy nocturnal rove, one moment halt,’Twixt stage and stage, of riot, and cabal;And lift thine eye (if bold an eye to lift,If bold to meet the face of injured Heaven)To yonder stars: for other ends they shine,Than to light revellers from shame to shame,680And, thus, be made accomplices in guilt.Why from yon arch, that infinite of space,With infinite of lucid orbs replete,Which set the living firmament on fire,At the first glance, in such an overwhelmOf wonderful, on man’s astonish’d sight,Rushes Omnipotence—To curb our pride;Our reason rouse, and lead it to that Power,Whose love lets down these silver chains of light;To draw up man’s ambition to Himself,690And bind our chaste affections to His throne.Thus the three virtues, least alive on earth,And welcomed on heaven’s coast with most applause,An humble, pure, and heavenly-minded heart,694Are here inspired:—and canst thou gaze too long?Nor stands thy wrath deprived of its reproof,Or un-upbraided by this radiant choir.The planets of each system representKind neighbours; mutual amity prevails;Sweet interchange of rays, received, return’d;Enlightening, and enlighten’d! all, at once,Attracting, and attracted! Patriot like,702None sins against the welfare of the whole;But their reciprocal, unselfish aid,Affords an emblem of millennial love.Nothing in nature, much less conscious being,Was e’er created solely for itself:Thus man his sovereign duty learns in thisMaterial picture of benevolence.And know, of all our supercilious race,710Thou most inflammable! thou wasp of men!Man’s angry heart, inspected, would be foundAs rightly set, as are the starry spheres;’Tis Nature’s structure, broke by stubborn will,Breeds all that uncelestial discord there.Wilt thou not feel the bias Nature gave?Canst thou descend from converse with the skies,And seize thy brother’s throat?—For what—a clod,An inch of earth? The planets cry, “Forbear!”They chase our double darkness; Nature’s gloom,720And (kinder still!) our intellectual night.And see, Day’s amiable sister sendsHer invitation, in the softest raysOf mitigated lustre; courts thy sight,Which suffers from her tyrant brother’s blaze.Night grants thee the full freedom of the skies,Nor rudely reprimands thy lifted eye;With gain, and joy, she bribes thee to be wise.728Night opes the noblest scenes, and sheds an awe,Which gives those venerable scenes full weight,And deep reception, in th’ intender’d heart;While light peeps through the darkness, like a spy;And darkness shows its grandeur by the light.Nor is the profit greater than the joy,If human hearts at glorious objects glow,And admiration can inspire delight.What speak I more, than I, this moment, feel?With pleasing stupor first the soul is struck(Stupor ordain’d to make her truly wise!):Then into transport starting from her trance,740With love, and admiration, how she glows!This gorgeous apparatus! this display!This ostentation of creative power!This theatre!—what eye can take it in?By what divine enchantment was it raised,For minds of the first magnitude to launchIn endless speculation, and adore?One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine;And light us deep into the Deity;How boundless in magnificence and might!750O what a confluence of ethereal fires,Form urns unnumber’d, down the steep of heaven,Streams to a point, and centres in my sight!Nor tarries there; I feel it at my heart.My heart, at once, it humbles, and exalts;Lays it in dust, and calls it to the skies.Who sees it unexalted? or unawed?Who sees it, and can stop at what is seen?Material offspring of Omnipotence!Inanimate, all-animating birth!760Work worthy Him who made it! worthy praise!All praise! praise more than human! nor denied762Thy praise divine!—But though man, drown’d in sleep,Withholds his homage, not alone I wake;Bright legions swarm unseen, and sing, unheardBy mortal ear, the glorious Architect,In this His universal temple hungWith lustres, with innumerable lights,That shed religion on the soul; at once,The temple, and the preacher! O how loud770It calls devotion! genuine growth of Night!Devotion! daughter of Astronomy!An undevout astronomer is mad.True; all things speak a God; but in the small,Men trace out Him; in great, He seizes man;Seizes, and elevates, and wraps, and fillsWith new inquiries, ’mid associates new.Tell me, ye stars! ye planets! tell me, allYe starr’d, and planeted, inhabitants! what is it?What are these sons of wonder? say, proud arch780(Within those azure palaces they dwell),Built with divine ambition! in disdainOf limit built! built in the taste of heaven!Vast concave! ample dome! wast thou design’dA meet apartment for the Deity?—Not so; that thought alone thy state impairs,Thy lofty sinks, and shallows thy profound,And straitens thy diffusive; dwarfs the whole,And makes a universe an orrery[60].But when I drop mine eye, and look on man,790Thy right regain’d, thy grandeur is restored,O Nature! wide flies off th’ expanding round.As when whole magazines, at once, are fired,The smitten air is hollow’d by the blow;The vast displosion dissipates the clouds;Shock’d ether’s billows dash the distant skies;796Thus (but far more) th’ expanding round flies off,And leaves a mighty void, a spacious womb,Might teem with new creation; reinflamedThy luminaries triumph, and assumeDivinity themselves. Nor was it strange,Matter high-wrought to such surprising pomp,Such godlike glory, stole the style of gods,803From ages dark, obtuse, and steep’d in sense;For, sure, to sense, they truly are divine,And half absolved idolatry from guilt;Nay, turn’d it into virtue. Such it wasIn those, who put forth all they had of manUnlost, to lift their thought, nor mounted higher;But, weak of wing, on planets perch’d; and thought810What was their highest, must be their adored.But they how weak, who could no higher mount?And are there, then, Lorenzo! those, to whomUnseen, and unexistent, are the same?And if incomprehensible is join’d,Who dare pronounce it madness, to believe?Why has the mighty Builder thrown asideAll measure in His work; stretch’d out His lineSo far, and spread amazement o’er the whole?Then (as he took delight in wide extremes),820Deep in the bosom of His universe,Dropp’d down that reasoning mite, that insect, Man,To crawl, and gaze, and wonder at the scene?—That man might ne’er presume to plead amazementFor disbelief of wonders in himself.Shall God be less miraculous, than whatHis hand has form’d? Shall mysteries descendFrom unmysterious? things more elevate,Be more familiar? uncreated lieMore obvious than created, to the grasp830Of human thought? The more of wonderfulIs heard in Him, the more we should assent.Could we conceive Him, God He could not be;Or He not God, or we could not be men.A God alone can comprehend a God;Man’s distance how immense! On such a theme,Know this, Lorenzo! (seem it ne’er so strange)Nothing can satisfy, but what confounds;Nothing, but what astonishes, is true.The scene thou seest, attests the truth I sing,840And every star sheds light upon thy creed.These stars, this furniture, this cost of heaven,If but reported, thou hadst ne’er believed;But thine eye tells thee, the romance is true.The grand of nature is th’ Almighty’s oath,In Reason’s court, to silence Unbelief.How my mind, opening at this scene, imbibesThe moral emanations of the skies,While nought, perhaps, Lorenzo less admires!Has the Great Sovereign sent ten thousand worlds850To tells us, He resides above them all,In glory’s unapproachable recess?And dare earth’s bold inhabitants denyThe sumptuous, the magnific embassyA moment’s audience? Turn we, nor will hearFrom whom they come, or what they would impartFor man’s emolument; sole cause that stoopsTheir grandeur to man’s eye? Lorenzo! rouse;Let thought, awaken’d, take the lightning’s wing,And glance from east to west, from pole to pole.860Who sees, but is confounded, or convinced?Renounces reason, or a God adores?Mankind was sent into the world to see:Sight gives the science needful to their peace;864That obvious science asks small learning’s aid.Would’st thou on metaphysic pinions soar?Or wound thy patience amid logic thorns?Or travel history’s enormous round?Nature no such hard task enjoins: she gaveA make to man directive of his thought;A make set upright, pointing to the stars,As who shall say, “Read thy chief lesson there.”872Too late to read this manuscript of heaven,When, like a parchment scroll, shrunk up by flames,It folds Lorenzo’s lesson from his sight.Lesson how various! Not the God alone,I see His ministers; I see, diffusedIn radiant orders, essences sublime,Of various offices, of various plume,In heavenly liveries, distinctly clad,880Azure, green, purple, pearl, or downy gold,Or all commix’d; they stand, with wings outspread,Listening to catch the Master’s least command,And fly through nature, ere the moment ends;Numbers innumerable!—well conceivedBy Pagan, and by Christian! O’er each spherePresides an angel, to direct its course,And feed, or fan, its flames; or to dischargeOther high trusts unknown. For who can seeSuch pomp of matter, and imagine, Mind,890For which alone Inanimate was made,More sparingly dispensed? that nobler son,Far liker the great Sire!—’Tis thus the skiesInform us of superiors numberless,As much, in excellence, above mankind,As above earth, in magnitude, the spheres.These, as a cloud of witnesses, hang o’er us;In a throng’d theatre are all our deeds;898Perhaps, a thousand demigods descendOn every beam we see, to walk with men.Awful reflection! Strong restraint from ill!Yet, here, our virtue finds still stronger aidFrom these ethereal glories sense surveys.Something, like magic, strikes from this blue vault;With just attention is it view’d? We feelA sudden succour, unimplored, unthought;Nature herself does half the work of Man.Seas, rivers, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks,The promontory’s height, the depth profoundOf subterranean, excavated grots[61],910Black brow’d, and vaulted high, and yawning wideFrom Nature’s structure, or the scoop of Time;If ample of dimension, vast of size,Even these an aggrandizing impulse give;Of solemn thought enthusiastic heightsEven these infuse.—But what of vast in these?Nothing;—or we must own the skies forgot.Much less in art.—Vain art! Thou pigmy power!How dost thou swell and strut, with human pride,To show thy littleness! What childish toys,920Thy watery columns squirted to the clouds!Thy basin’d rivers, and imprison’d seas!Thy mountains moulded into forms of men!Thy hundred-gated capitals! or thoseWhere three days’ travel left us much to ride;Gazing on miracles by mortals wrought,Arches triumphal, theatres immense,Or nodding gardens pendent in mid-air!Or temples proud to meet their gods half-way!Yet these affect us in no common kind.930What then the force of such superior scenes?Enter a temple, it will strike an awe:932What awe from this the Deity has built!A good man seen, though silent, counsel gives:The touch’d spectator wishes to be wise:In a bright mirror His own hands have made,Here we see something like the face of God.Seems it not then enough, to say, Lorenzo!To man abandon’d, “Hast thou seen the skies?”And yet, so thwarted Nature’s kind design940By daring man, he makes her sacred awe(That guard from ill) his shelter, his temptationTo more than common guilt, and quite invertsCelestial art’s intent. The trembling starsSee crimes gigantic, stalking through the gloomWith front erect, that hide their head by day,And making night still darker by their deeds.Slumbering in covert, till the shades descend,Rapine and Murder, link’d, now prowl for prey.The miser earths his treasure; and the thief,950Watching the mole, half beggars him ere morn.Now plots, and foul conspiracies, awake;And, muffling up their horrors from the moon,Havoc and devastation they prepare,And kingdoms tottering in the field of blood.Now sons of riot in mid-revel rage.What shall I do?—suppress it? or proclaim?—Why sleeps the thunder? Now, Lorenzo! now,His best friend’s couch the rank adultererAscends secure; and laughs at gods and men.960Preposterous madmen, void of fear or shame,Lay their crimes bare to these chaste eyes of Heaven;Yet shrink, and shudder, at a mortal’s sight.Were moon, and stars, for villains only made?To guide, yet screen them, with tenebrious[62]light?No; they were made to fashion the sublime966Of human hearts, and wiser make the wise.Those ends were answer’d once; when mortals livedOf stronger wing, of aquiline ascentIn theory sublime. O how unlikeThose vermin of the night, this moment sung,Who crawl on earth, and on her venom feed!972Those ancient sages, human stars! They metTheir brothers of the skies, at midnight hour;Their counsel ask’d; and, what they ask’d, obey’d.The Stagirite, and Plato, he who drank[63]The poison’d bowl, and he of Tusculum,[64]With him of Corduba,[65](immortal names!)In these unbounded, and Elysian, walks,An area fit for gods, and godlike men,980They took their nightly round, through radiant pathsBy seraphs trod; instructed, chiefly, thus,To tread in their bright footsteps here below;To walk in worth still brighter than the skies.There they contracted their contempt of earth;Of hopes eternal kindled, there, the fire;There, as in near approach, they glow’d, and grew(Great visitants!) more intimate with God,More worth to men, more joyous to themselves.Through various virtues, they, with ardour, ran990The zodiac of their learn’d, illustrious lives.In Christian hearts, O for a Pagan zeal!A needful, but opprobrious prayer! As muchOur ardour less, as greater is our light.How monstrous this in morals! Scarce more strangeWould this phenomenon in nature strike,A sun, that froze her, or a star, that warm’d.What taught these heroes of the moral world?998To these thou givest thy praise, give credit too.These doctors ne’er were pension’d to deceive thee;And Pagan tutors are thy taste.—They taught,That, narrow views betray to misery:That, wise it is to comprehend the whole:That, virtue, rose from nature, ponder’d well,The single base of virtue built to heaven:That God, and nature, our attention claim:That nature is the glass reflecting God,As, by the sea, reflected is the sun,Too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere:That, mind immortal loves immortal aims:1010That, boundless mind affects a boundless space:That vast surveys, and the sublime of things,The soul assimilate, and make her great:That, therefore, heaven her glories, as a fundOf inspiration, thus spreads out to man.Such are their doctrines; such the Night inspired.And what more true? what truth of greater weight?The soul of man was made to walk the skies;Delightful outlet of her prison here!There, disencumber’d from her chains, the ties1020Of toys terrestrial, she can rove at large;There, freely can respire, dilate, extend,In full proportion let loose all her powers;And, undeluded, grasp at something great.Nor, as a stranger, does she wander there;But, wonderful herself, through wonder strays;Contemplating their grandeur, finds her own;Dives deep in their economy divine,Sits high in judgment on their various laws,And, like a master, judges not amiss.1030Hence greatly pleased, and justly proud, the soulGrows conscious of her birth celestial; breathes1032More life, more vigour, in her native air;And feels herself at home amongst the stars;And, feeling, emulates her country’s praise.What call we, then, the firmament, Lorenzo?—As earth the body, since the skies sustainThe soul with food, that gives immortal life,Call it, the noble pasture of the mind;Which there expatiates, strengthens, and exults,1040And riots through the luxuries of thought.Call it, the garden of the Deity,Blossom’d with stars, redundant in the growthOf fruit ambrosial; moral fruit to man.Call it, the breastplate of the true High Priest,Ardent with gems oracular, that give,In points of highest moment, right response;And ill neglected, if we prize our peace.Thus, have we found a true astrology;Thus, have we found a new, and noble sense,1050In which alone stars govern human fates.O that the stars (as some have feign’d) let fallBloodshed, and havoc, on embattled realms,And rescued monarchs from so black a guilt!Bourbon! this wish how generous in a foe!Would’st thou be great, would’st thou become a god,And stick thy deathless name among the stars,For mighty conquests on a needle’s point?Instead of forging chains for foreigners,Bastile thy tutor: grandeur all thy aim?1060As yet thou know’st not what it is: how great,How glorious, then, appears the mind of man,When in it all the stars, and planets, roll!And what it seems, it is: great objects makeGreat minds, enlarging as their views enlarge;1065Those still more godlike, as these more divine.And more divine than these, thou canst not see.Dazzled, o’erpower’d, with the delicious draughtOf miscellaneous splendours, how I reelFrom thought to thought, inebriate, without end!An Eden, this! a Paradise unlost!I meet the Deity in every view,1072And tremble at my nakedness before him!O that I could but reach the tree of life!For here it grows, unguarded from our taste;No flaming sword denies our entrance here;Would man but gather, he might live for ever.Lorenzo! much of moral hast thou seen.Of curious arts art thou more fond? Then markThe mathematic glories of the skies,1080In number, weight, and measure, all ordain’d.Lorenzo’s boasted builders, Chance, and Fate,Are left to finish his aërial towers;Wisdom and choice, their well-known charactersHere deep impress; and claim it for their own.Though splendid all, no splendour void of use;Use rivals beauty; art contends with power;No wanton waste, amid effuse expense;The great Economist adjusting allTo prudent pomp, magnificently wise.1090How rich the prospect! and for ever new!And newest to the man that views it most;For newer still in infinite succeeds.Then, these aërial racers, O how swift!How the shaft loiters from the strongest string!Spirit alone can distance the career.Orb above orb ascending without end!Circle in circle, without end, enclosed!Wheel, within wheel; Ezekiel! like to thine!1099Like thine, it seems a vision or a dream;Though seen, we labour to believe it true!What involution! what extent! what swarmsOf worlds, that laugh at earth! immensely great!Immensely distant from each other’s spheres!What, then, the wondrous space through which they roll?At once it quite engulfs all human thought;’Tis comprehension’s absolute defeat.Nor think thou seest a wild disorder here;Through this illustrious chaos to the sight,Arrangement neat, and chastest order, reign.1110The path prescribed, inviolably kept,Upbraids the lawless sallies of mankind.Worlds, ever thwarting, never interfere;What knots are tied! how soon are they dissolved,And set the seeming married planets free!They rove for ever, without error rove;Confusion unconfused! nor less admireThis tumult untumultuous; all on wing!In motion, all! yet what profound repose!What fervid action, yet no noise! as awed1120To silence, by the presence of their Lord;Or hush’d by His command, in love to man,And bid let fall soft beams on human rest,Restless themselves. On yon cerulean plain,In exultation to their God, and thine,They dance, they sing eternal jubilee,Eternal celebration of His praise.But, since their song arrives not at our ear,Their dance perplex’d exhibits to the sightFair hieroglyphic of His peerless power.1130Mark how the labyrinthian turns they take,The circles intricate, and mystic maze,Weave the grand cipher of Omnipotence;1133To gods, how great! how legible to man!Leaves so much wonder greater wonder still?Where are the pillars that support the skies?What more than Atlantean shoulder propsTh’ incumbent load? What magic, what strange art,In fluid air these ponderous orbs sustains?Who would not think them hung in golden chains?—1140And so they are; in the high will of heaven,Which fixes all; makes adamant of air,Or air of adamant; makes all of nought,Or nought of all; if such the dread decree.Imagine from their deep foundations tornThe most gigantic sons of earth, the broadAnd towering Alps, all toss’d into the sea;And, light as down, or volatile as air,Their bulks enormous, dancing on the waves,In time, and measure, exquisite; while all1150The winds, in emulation of the spheres,Tune their sonorous instruments aloft;The concert swell, and animate the ball.Would this appear amazing? What, then, worlds,In a far thinner element sustain’d,And acting the same part, with greater skill,More rapid movement, and for noblest ends?More obvious ends to pass, are not these starsThe seats majestic, proud imperial thrones,On which angelic delegates of heaven,1160At certain periods, as the Sovereign nods,Discharge high trusts of vengeance, or of love;To clothe, in outward grandeur, grand design,And acts most solemn still more solemnize?Ye citizens of air! what ardent thanks,What full effusion of the grateful heart,Is due from man indulged in such a sight!1167A sight so noble! and a sight so kind!It drops new truths at every new survey!Feels not Lorenzo something stir within,That sweeps away all period? As these spheresMeasure duration, they no less inspireThe godlike hope of ages without end.The boundless space, through which these rovers takeTheir restless roam, suggests the sister thoughtOf boundless time. Thus, by kind Nature’s skill,To man unlabour’d, that important guest,Eternity, finds entrance at the sight:And an eternity, for man ordain’d,Or these his destined midnight counsellors,1180The stars, had never whisper’d it to man.Nature informs, but ne’er insults, her sons.Could she then kindle the most ardent wishTo disappoint it?—That is blasphemy.Thus, of thy creed a second article,Momentous, as th’ existence of a God,Is found (as I conceive) where rarely sought;And thou may’st read thy soul immortal, here.Here, then, Lorenzo! on these glories dwell;Nor want the gilt, illuminated, roof,1190That calls the wretched gay to dark delights.Assemblies?—This is one divinely bright;Here, unendanger’d in health, wealth, or fame,Range through the fairest, and the Sultan scorn;He, wise as thou, no crescent holds so fair,As that, which on his turban awes a world;And thinks the moon is proud to copy him.Look on her, and gain more than worlds can give,A mind superior to the charms of power.Thou muffled in delusions of this life!1200Can yonder moon turn ocean in his bed,1201From side to side, in constant ebb, and flow,And purify from stench his watery realms?And fails her moral influence? wants she powerTo turn Lorenzo’s stubborn tide of thoughtFrom stagnating on earth’s infected shore,And purge from nuisance his corrupted heart?Fails her attraction when it draws to heaven?Nay, and to what thou valuest more, earth’s joy?Minds elevate, and panting for unseen,1210And defecate[66]from sense, alone obtainFull relish of existence undeflower’d,The life of life, the zest of worldly bliss:All else on earth amounts—to what? to this:“Bad to be suffer’d; blessings to be left:”Earth’s richest inventory boasts no more.Of higher scenes be, then, the call obey’d.O let me gaze!—Of gazing there’s no end.O let me think!—Thought too is wilder’d here;In midway flight imagination tires;1220Yet soon reprunes her wing to soar anew,Her point unable to forbear, or gain;So great the pleasure, so profound the plan!A banquet, this, where men, and angels, meet,Eat the same manna, mingle earth and heaven.How distant some of these nocturnal suns!So distant (says the sage), ’twere not absurdTo doubt, if beams, set out at Nature’s birth,Are yet arrived at this so foreign world;Though nothing half so rapid as their flight.1230An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,And roll for ever: who can satiate sightIn such a scene? in such an ocean wideOf deep astonishment? where depth, height, breadth,Are lost in their extremes; and where to count1235The thick-sown glories in this field of fire,Perhaps a seraph’s computation fails.Now, go, Ambition! boast thy boundless mightIn conquest, o’er the tenth part of a grain.And yet Lorenzo calls for miracles,To give his tottering faith a solid base.Why call for less than is already thine?1242Thou art no novice in theology;What is a miracle?—’Tis a reproach,’Tis an implicit satire, on mankind;And while it satisfies, it censures too.To common sense, great Nature’s course proclaimsA Deity: when mankind falls asleep,A miracle is sent, as an alarm;To wake the world, and prove Him o’er again,1250By recent argument, but not more strong.Say, which imports more plenitude of power,Or nature’s laws to fix, or to repeal?To make a sun, or stop his mid career?To countermand his orders, and send backThe flaming courier to the frighted east,Warm’d, and astonish’d, at his evening ray?Or bid the moon, as with her journey tired,In Ajalon’s[67]soft, flowery vale repose?Great things are these; still greater, to create.1260From Adam’s bower look down through the whole trainOf miracles;—resistless is their power?They do not, can not, more amaze the mind,Than this, call’d unmiraculous survey,If duly weigh’d, if rationally seen,If seen with human eyes. The brute, indeed,Sees nought but spangles here; the fool, no more.Say’st thou, “The course of nature governs all?”The course of Nature is the art of God.1269The miracles thou call’st for, this attest;For say, could Nature Nature’s course control?But, miracles apart, who sees Him not,Nature’s controller, author, guide, and end?Who turns his eye on Nature’s midnight face,But must inquire—“What hand behind the scene,What arm almighty, put these wheeling globesIn motion, and wound up the vast machine?Who rounded in his palm these spacious orbs?Who bowl’d them flaming through the dark profound,Numerous as glittering gems of morning dew,1280Or sparks from populous cities in a blaze,And set the bosom of old Night on fire?Peopled her desert, and made horror smile?”Or, if the military style delights thee(For stars have fought their battles, leagued with man),“Who marshals this bright host? enrols their names?Appoints their posts, their marches, and returns,Punctual, at stated periods? who disbandsThese veteran troops, their final duty done,If e’er disbanded?”—He, whose potent word,1290Like the loud trumpet, levied first their powersIn Night’s inglorious empire, where they sleptIn beds of darkness: arm’d them with fierce flames,Arranged, and disciplined, and clothed in gold;And call’d them out of chaos to the field,Where now they war with vice and unbelief.O let us join this army! joining these,Will give us hearts intrepid, at that hour,When brighter flames shall cut a darker night;When these strong demonstrations of a God1300Shall hide their heads, or tumble from their spheres,And one eternal curtain cover all!Struck at that thought, as new awaked, I lift1303A more enlighten’d eye, and read the starsTo man still more propitious; and their aid(Though guiltless of idolatry) implore;Nor longer rob them of their noblest name.O ye dividers of my time! ye brightAccountants of my days, and months, and years,In your fair calendar distinctly mark’d!1310Since that authentic, radiant register,Though man inspects it not, stands good against him;Since you, and years, roll on, though man stands still;Teach me my days to number, and applyMy trembling heart to wisdom; now beyondAll shadow of excuse for fooling on.Age smooths our path to prudence; sweeps asideThe snares keen appetite and passion spreadTo catch stray souls; and woe to that grey head,Whose folly would undo, what age has done!1320Aid then, aid, all ye stars!—Much rather, Thou,Great Artist! Thou, whose finger set arightThis exquisite machine, with all its wheels,Though intervolved, exact; and pointing outLife’s rapid, and irrevocable flight,With such an index fair, as none can miss,Who lifts an eye, nor sleeps till it is closed.Open mine eye, dread Deity! to readThe tacit doctrine of thy works; to seeThings as they are, unalter’d through the glass1330Of worldly wishes. Time, eternity!(’Tis these, mismeasured, ruin all mankind)Set them before me; let me lay them bothIn equal scale, and learn their various weight.Let time appear a moment, as it is;And let eternity’s full orb, at once,Turn on my soul, and strike it into heaven.1337When shall I see far more than charms me now?Gaze on creation’s model in thy breastUnveil’d, nor wonder at the transcript more?When this vile, foreign, dust, which smothers allThat travel earth’s deep vale, shall I shake off?When shall my soul her incarnation quit,And, readopted to thy bless’d embrace,Obtain her apotheosis in Thee?Dost think, Lorenzo, this is wandering wide?No,’tis directly striking at the mark;To wake thy dead devotion was my point;And how I bless Night’s consecrating shades,Which to a temple turn an universe;1350Fill us with great ideas, full of heaven,And antidote the pestilential earth!In every storm, that either frowns, or falls,What an asylum has the soul in prayer!And what a fane[68]is this, in which to pray!And what a God must dwell in such a fane!Oh, what a genius must inform the skies!And is Lorenzo’s salamander heartCold, and untouch’d, amid these sacred fires?O ye nocturnal sparks! ye glowing embers,1360On heaven’s broad hearth! who burn, or burn no more,Who blaze, or die, as Great Jehovah’s breathOr blows you, or forbears; assist my song;Pour your whole influence; exorcise his heart,So long possess’d; and bring him back to man.And is Lorenzo a demurrer still?Pride in thy parts provokes thee to contestTruths, which, contested, put thy parts to shame.Nor shame they more Lorenzo’s head than heart,A faithless heart, how despicably small!1370Too strait, aught great or generous to receive!1371Fill’d with an atom! fill’d, and foul’d, with self!And self mistaken! self, that lasts an hour!Instincts and passions, of the nobler kind,Lie suffocated there; or they alone,Reason apart, would wake high hope; and open,To ravish’d thought, that intellectual sphere,Where order, wisdom, goodness, providence,Their endless miracles of love display,And promise all the truly great desire.1380The mind that would be happy, must be great;Great, in its wishes; great, in its surveys.Extended views a narrow mind extend;Push out its corrugate, expansive make,Which, ere long, more than planets shall embrace.A man of compass makes a man of worth;Divine contemplate, and become divine.As man was made for glory, and for bliss,All littleness is in approach to woe;Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,1390And let in manhood; let in happiness;Admit the boundless theatre of thoughtFrom nothing, up to God; which makes a man.Take God from nature, nothing great is left;Man’s mind is in a pit, and nothing sees;Man’s heart is in a jakes[69], and loves the mire.Emerge from thy profound; erect thine eye;See thy distress! how close art thou besieged!Besieged by Nature, the proud sceptic’s foe!Enclosed by these innumerable worlds,1400Sparkling conviction on the darkest mind,As in a golden net of Providence.How art thou caught, sure captive of belief!From this thy bless’d captivity, what art,What blasphemy to reason, sets thee free!1405This scene is heaven’s indulgent violence:Canst thou bear up against this tide of glory?What is earth bosom’d in these ambient orbs,But, faith in God imposed, and press’d on man?Darest thou still litigate thy desperate cause,Spite of these numerous, awful, witnesses,And doubt the deposition of the skies?1412O how laborious is thy way to ruin!Laborious! ’tis impracticable quite;To sink beyond a doubt, in this debate,With all his weight of wisdom and of will,And crime flagitious, I defy a fool.Some wish they did; but no man disbelieves.God is a spirit; spirit cannot strikeThese gross, material organs; God by man1420As much is seen, as man a God can see,In these astonishing exploits of power.What order, beauty, motion, distance, size!Concertion of design, how exquisite!How complicate, in their divine police!Apt means! great ends! consent to general good!—Each attribute of these material gods,So long (and that with specious pleas) adored,A separate conquest gains o’er rebel thought;And leads in triumph the whole mind of man.1430Lorenzo! this may seem harangue to thee;Such all is apt to seem, that thwarts our will.And dost thou, then, demand a simple proofOf this great master moral of the skies,Unskill’d, or disinclined, to read it there?Since ’tis the basis, and all drops without it,Take it, in one compact, unbroken chain.Such proof insists on an attentive ear;’Twill not make one amid a mob of thoughts,1439And, for thy notice, struggle with the world.Retire;—the world shut out;—thy thoughts call home;—Imagination’s airy wing repress;—Lock up thy senses;—let no passion stir;—Wake all to Reason;—let her reign alone;—Then, in thy soul’s deep silence, and the depthOf Nature’s silence, midnight, thus inquire,As I have done; and shall inquire no more.In nature’s channel, thus the questions run:“What am I? and from whence?—I nothing know,But that I am; and, since I am, conclude1450Something eternal: had there e’er been nought,Nought still had been: eternal there must be.—But what eternal?—Why not human race?And Adam’s ancestors without an end?—That’s hard to be conceived; since every linkOf that long-chain’d succession is so frail;Can every part depend, and not the whole?Yet grant it true; new difficulties rise;I’m still quite out at sea; nor see the shore.Whence earth, and these bright orbs?—eternal too?Grant matter was eternal; still these orbs1461Would want some other father;—much designIs seen in all their motions, all their makes;Design implies intelligence, and art;That can’t be from themselves—or man; that artMan scarce can comprehend, could man bestow?And nothing greater yet allow’d than man.—Who, motion, foreign to the smallest grain,Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?Who bid brute matter’s restive lump assume1470Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?Has matter innate motion? then each atom,Asserting its indisputable right1473To dance, would form an universe of dust:Has matter none? Then whence these glorious formsAnd boundless flights, from shapeless, and reposed?Has matter more than motion? Has it thought,Judgment, and genius? Is it deeply learn’dIn mathematics? Has it framed such laws,Which but to guess, a Newton made immortal?—1480If so, how each sage atom laughs at me,Who think a clod inferior to a man!If art, to form; and counsel, to conduct;And that with greater far than human skill;Resides not in each block;—a Godhead reigns.—Grant, then, invisible, eternal, Mind;That granted, all is solved.—But, granting that,Draw I not o’er me a still darker cloud?Grant I not that which I can ne’er conceive?A being without origin, or end!—1490Hail, human liberty! There is no God—Yet, why? On either scheme that knot subsists;Subsist it must, in God, or human race;If in the last, how many knots beside,Indissoluble all?—Why choose it there,Where, chosen, still subsist ten thousand more?Reject it, where, that chosen, all the restDispersed, leave reason’s whole horizon clear?This is not reason’s dictate; Reason says,Close with the side where one grain turns the scale;—1500What vast preponderance is here! can reasonWith louder voice exclaim—Believe a God?And reason heard, is the sole mark of man.What things impossible must man think true,On any other system! and how strangeTo disbelieve, through mere credulity!”If, in this chain, Lorenzo finds no flaw,1507Let it for ever bind him to belief.And where the link, in which a flaw he finds?And, if a God there is, that God how great!How great that Power, whose providential careThrough these bright orbs’ dark centres darts a ray!Of nature universal threads the whole!And hangs creation, like a precious gem,Though little, on the footstool of his throne!That little gem, how large! A weight let fallFrom a fix’d star, in ages can it reachThis distant earth! Say, then, Lorenzo! where,Where, ends this mighty building? where, beginThe suburbs of creation? where, the wall1520Whose battlements look o’er into the valeOf non-existence! Nothing’s strange abode!Say, at what point of space Jehovah dropp’dHis slacken’d line, and laid his balance by;Weigh’d worlds, and measured infinite, no more?Where, rears His terminating pillar highIts extra-mundane head? and says, to gods,In characters illustrious as the sun,—

As when a traveller, a long day pastIn painful search of what he cannot find,At night’s approach, content with the next cot,There ruminates, a while, his labour lost;Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,Till the due season calls him to repose:Thus I, long-travell’d in the ways of men,And dancing, with the rest, the giddy maze,Where Disappointment smiles at Hope’s career;10Warn’d by the languor of life’s evening ray,At length have housed me in an humble shed;Where, future wandering banish’d from my thought,And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,I chase the moments with a serious song.Song soothes our pains; and age has pains to soothe.When age, care, crime, and friends embraced at heart,Torn from my bleeding breast, and death’s dark shade,Which hovers o’er me, quench th’ ethereal fire;Canst thou, O Night! indulge one labour more?20One labour more indulge! then sleep, my strain!21Till, haply, waked by Raphael’s golden lyre,Where night, death, age, care, crime, and sorrow, cease;To bear a part in everlasting lays;Though far, far higher set, in aim, I trust,Symphonious to this humble prelude here.Has not the Muse asserted pleasures pure,Like those above; exploding other joys?Weigh what was urged, Lorenzo! fairly weigh;And tell me, hast thou cause to triumph still?30I think, thou wilt forbear a boast so bold.But if, beneath the favour of mistake,Thy smile’s sincere; not more sincere can beLorenzo’s smile, than my compassion for him.The sick in body call for aid; the sickIn mind are covetous of more disease;And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well.To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure.When Nature’s blush by Custom is wiped off,And Conscience, deaden’d by repeated strokes,40Has into manners naturalized our crimes;The curse of curses is, our curse to love;To triumph in the blackness of our guilt(As Indians glory in the deepest jet),And throw aside our senses with our peace.But grant no guilt, no shame, no least alloy;Grant joy and glory quite unsullied shone;Yet, still, it ill deserves Lorenzo’s heart.No joy, no glory, glitters in thy sight,But, through the thin partition of an hour,50I see its sables wove by destiny;And that in sorrow buried; this, in shame;While howling furies wring the doleful knell;And Conscience, now so soft thou scarce canst hear54Her whisper, echoes her eternal peal.Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?How many sleep, who kept the world awakeWith lustre, and with noise! has Death proclaim’dA truce, and hung his sated lance on high?’Tis brandish’d still; nor shall the present yearBe more tenacious of her human leaf,62Or spread of feeble life a thinner fall.But needless monuments to wake the thought;Life’s gayest scenes speak man’s mortality;Though in a style more florid, full as plain,As mausoleums, pyramids, and tombs.What are our noblest ornaments, but deathsTurn’d flatterers of life, in paint, or marble,The well-stain’d canvas, or the featured stone?70Our fathers grace, or rather haunt, the scene.Joy peoples her pavilion from the dead.“Profess’d diversions! cannot these escape?”Far from it: these present us with a shroud;And talk of death, like garlands o’er a grave.As some bold plunderers, for buried wealth,We ransack tombs for pastime; from the dustCall up the sleeping hero; bid him treadThe scene for our amusement: how like godsWe sit; and, wrapt in immortality,80Shed generous tears on wretches born to die;Their fate deploring, to forget our own!What all the pomps and triumphs of our lives,But legacies in blossom? Our lean soil,Luxuriant grown, and rank in vanities,From friends interr’d beneath; a rich manure!Like other worms, we banquet on the dead;Like other worms, shall we crawl on, nor know88Our present frailties, or approaching fate?Lorenzo! such the glories of the world!What is the world itself? thy world—a grave.Where is the dust that has not been alive?The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;From human mould we reap our daily bread.The globe around earth’s hollow surface shakes,And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.O’er devastation we blind revels keep;Whole buried towns support the dancer’s heel.The moist of human frame the sun exhales;Winds scatter through the mighty void the dry;100Earth repossesses part of what she gave,And the freed spirit mounts on wings of fire;Each element partakes our scatter’d spoils;As nature, wide, our ruins spread: man’s deathInhabits all things, but the thought of man.Nor man alone; his breathing bust expires,His tomb is mortal; empires die: where, now,The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty name!Yet few regard them in this useful light;Though half our learning is their epitaph.110When down thy vale, unlock’d by midnight thought,That loves to wander in thy sunless realms,O Death! I stretch my view: what visions rise!What triumphs! toils imperial! arts divine!In wither’d laurels glide before my sight!What lengths of far-famed ages, billow’d highWith human agitation, roll alongIn unsubstantial images of air!The melancholy ghosts of dead renown,Whispering faint echoes of the world’s applause,120With penitential aspect, as they pass,All point at earth, and hiss at human pride,122The wisdom of the wise, and prancings of the great.But, O Lorenzo! far the rest above,Of ghastly nature, and enormous size,One form assaults my sight, and chills my blood,And shakes my frame. Of one departed world[52]I see the mighty shadow: oozy wreathAnd dismal seaweed crown her; o’er her urnReclined, she weeps her desolated realms,130And bloated sons; and, weeping, prophesiesAnother’s dissolution, soon, in flames.But, like Cassandra, prophesies in vain;In vain, to many; not, I trust, to thee.For, know’st thou not, or art thou loath to know,The great decree, the counsel of the skies?Deluge and conflagration, dreadful powers!Prime ministers of vengeance! chain’d in cavesDistinct, apart the giant furies roar;Apart; or, such their horrid rage for ruin,140In mutual conflict would they rise, and wageEternal war, till one was quite devour’d.But not for this, ordain’d their boundless rage;When Heaven’s inferior instruments of wrath,War, famine, pestilence, are found too weakTo scourge a world for her enormous crimes,These are let loose, alternate: down they rush,Swift and tempestuous, from th’ eternal throne,With irresistible commission arm’d,The world, in vain corrected, to destroy,150And ease creation of the shocking scene.Seest thou, Lorenzo! what depends on man?The fate of Nature; as for man, her birth.Earth’s actors change earth’s transitory scenes,And make creation groan with human guilt.155How must it groan, in a new deluge whelm’d,But not of waters! At the destined hour,By the loud trumpet summon’d to the charge,See, all the formidable sons of fire,Eruptions, earthquakes, comets, lightnings, playTheir various engines; all at once disgorgeTheir blazing magazines; and take, by storm,162This poor terrestrial citadel of man.Amazing period! when each mountain-heightOutburns Vesuvius; rocks eternal pourTheir melted mass, as rivers once they pour’d;Stars rush; and final Ruin fiercely drivesHer ploughshare o’er creation!—while aloft,More than astonishment! if more can be!Far other firmament than e’er was seen,170Than e’er was thought by man! far other stars!Stars animate, that govern these of fire;Far other sun!—A sun, O how unlikeThe Babe at Bethlehem! how unlike the Man,That groan’d on Calvary!—Yet He it is;That Man of Sorrows! O how changed! what pomp!In grandeur terrible, all heaven descends!And gods, ambitious, triumph in his train.A swift archangel, with his golden wing,As blots and clouds, that darken and disgrace180The scene divine, sweeps stars and suns aside.And now, all dross removed, heaven’s own pure day,Full on the confines of our ether, flames:While (dreadful contrast!) far, how far beneath!Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,And storms sulphureous; her voracious jawsExpanding wide, and roaring for her prey.Lorenzo! welcome to this scene; the lastIn nature’s course; the first in wisdom’s thought.189This strikes, if aught can strike thee; this awakesThe most supine; this snatches man from death.Rouse, rouse, Lorenzo, then, and follow me,Where truth, the most momentous man can hear,Loud calls my soul, and ardour wings her flight.I find my inspiration in my theme:The grandeur of my subject is my Muse.At midnight, when mankind is wrapt in peace,And worldly fancy feeds on golden dreams;To give more dread to man’s most dreadful hour.At midnight, ’tis presumed, this pomp will burst200From tenfold darkness; sudden as the sparkFrom smitten steel; from nitrous grain, the blaze.Man, starting from his couch, shall sleep no more!The day is broke, which never more shall close!Above, around, beneath, amazement all!Terror and glory join’d in their extremes!Our God in grandeur, and our world on fire!All nature struggling in the pangs of death!Dost thou not hear her? Dost thou not deploreHer strong convulsions, and her final groan?210Where are we now? Ah me! the ground is gone,On which we stood; Lorenzo! while thou may’st,Provide more firm support, or sink for ever!Where? how? from whence? Vain hope! it is too late!Where, where, for shelter, shall the guilty fly,When consternation turns the good man pale?Great day! for which all other days were made;For which earth rose from chaos, man from earth;And an eternity, the date of gods,Descended on poor earth-created man!220Great day of dread, decision, and despair!At thought of thee, each sublunary wishLets go its eager grasp, and drops the world;223And catches at each reed of hope in heaven.At thought of thee!—And art thou absent then?Lorenzo! no; ’tis here; it is begun;—Already is begun the grand assize,In thee, in all: deputed Conscience scalesThe dread tribunal, and forestalls our doom;Forestalls; and, by forestalling, proves it sure.230Why on himself should man void judgment pass?Is idle Nature laughing at her sons?Who Conscience sent, her sentence will support,And God above assert that God in man.Thrice happy they that enter now the courtHeaven opens in their bosoms! but, how rare,Ah me! that magnanimity, how rare!What hero, like the man who stands himself;Who dares to meet his naked heart alone;Who bears, intrepid, the full charge it brings,240Resolved to silence future murmurs there?The coward flies; and, flying, is undone.(Art thou a coward? No.) The coward flies;Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know;Asks, “What is truth?” with Pilate; and retires;Dissolves the court, and mingles with the throng;Asylum sad! from reason, hope, and heaven!Shall all, but man look out with ardent eye,For that great day, which was ordain’d for man?O day of consummation! mark supreme250(If men are wise) of human thought! nor least,Or in the sight of angels, or their King!Angels, whose radiant circles, height o’er height,Order o’er order, rising, blaze o’er blaze,As in a theatre, surround this scene,Intent on man, and anxious for his fate.Angels look out for thee; for thee, their Lord,257To vindicate his glory; and for thee,Creation universal calls aloud,To disinvolve the moral world, and giveTo Nature’s renovation brighter charms.Shall man alone, whose fate, whose final fateHangs on that hour, exclude it from his thought?I think of nothing else; I see! I feel it!All nature, like an earthquake, trembling round!All deities, like summer’s swarms, on wing!All basking in the full meridian blaze!I see the Judge enthroned! the flaming guard!The volume open’d! open’d every heart!A sunbeam pointing out each secret thought!270No patron! intercessor none! now pastThe sweet, the clement, mediatorial hour!For guilt no plea! to pain, no pause! no bound!Inexorable, all! and all, extreme!Nor man alone; the Foe of God and man,From his dark den, blaspheming, drags his chain,And rears his brazen front, with thunder scarr’d:Receives his sentence, and begins his hell.All vengeance past, now, seems abundant grace:Like meteors in a stormy sky, how roll280His baleful eyes! he curses whom he dreads;And deems it the first moment of his fall.’Tis present to my thought!—and yet where is it?Angels can’t tell me; angels cannot guessThe period; from created beings lock’dIn darkness. But the process, and the place,Are less obscure; for these may man inquire.Say, thou great close of human hopes and fears!Great key of hearts! great finisher of fates!Great end! and great beginning! say, Where art thou?Art thou in time, or in eternity?291Nor in eternity, nor time, I find thee.These, as two monarchs, on their borders meet,(Monarchs of all elapsed, or unarrived!)As in debate, how best their powers allied,May swell the grandeur, or discharge the wrath,Of Him, whom both their monarchies obey.Time, this vast fabric for him built (and doom’dWith him to fall), now bursting o’er his head;His lamp, the sun, extinguish’d; from beneath300The frown of hideous darkness, calls his sonsFrom their long slumber; from earth’s heaving womb,To second birth! contemporary throng!Roused at one call, upstarted from one bed,Press’d in one crowd, appall’d with one amaze,He turns them o’er, Eternity! to thee.Then (as a king deposed disdains to live)He falls on his own scythe; nor falls alone:His greatest foe falls with him; Time, and heWho murder’d all Time’s offspring, Death, expire.310Time was! Eternity now reigns alone:Awful eternity! offended queen!And her resentment to mankind, how just!With kind intent, soliciting access,How often has she knock’d at human hearts!Rich to repay their hospitality;How often call’d! and with the voice of God!Yet bore repulse, excluded as a cheat!A dream! while foulest foes found welcome there!A dream, a cheat, now, all things, but her smile.320For, lo! her twice ten thousand gates thrown wide,As thrice from Indus to the frozen pole,With banners streaming as the comet’s blaze,And clarions, louder than the deep in storms,Sonorous as immortal breath can blow,325Pour forth their myriads, potentates, and powers,Of light, of darkness; in a middle field,Wide, as creation! populous, as wide!A neutral region! there to mark th’ eventOf that great drama, whose preceding scenesDetain’d them close spectators, through a lengthOf ages, ripening to this grand result;332Ages, as yet unnumber’d, but by God;Who now, pronouncing sentence, vindicatesThe rights of Virtue, and his own renown.Eternity, the various sentence past,Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes,Sulphureous, or ambrosial. What ensues?The deed predominant! the deed of deeds!Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven.340The goddess, with determined aspect, turnsHer adamantine key’s enormous sizeThrough destiny’s inextricable wards,Deep driving every bolt, on both their fates.Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,Down, down, she hurls it through the dark profound,Ten thousand thousand fathom; there to rust,And ne’er unlock her resolution more.The deep resounds; and hell, through all her glooms,Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.350O how unlike the chorus of the skies!O how unlike those shouts of joy, that shakeThe whole ethereal! how the concave rings!Nor strange! when deities their voice exalt;And louder far, than when creation rose,To see creation’s godlike aim, and end,So well accomplish’d! so divinely closed!To see the mighty dramatist’s last act,(As meet), in glory rising o’er the rest.359No fancied god, a God indeed, descends,To solve all knots; to strike the moral home;To throw full day on darkest scenes of time;To clear, commend, exalt, and crown the whole.Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise,The charm’d spectators thunder their applause;And the vast void beyond, applause resounds.What then am I?—Amidst applauding worlds,And worlds celestial, is there found on earth,A peevish, dissonant, rebellious string,370Which jars in the grand chorus, and complains?Censure on thee, Lorenzo! I suspend,And turn it on myself; how greatly due!All, all is right; by God ordain’d or done;And who, but God, resumed the friends He gave?And have I been complaining, then, so long?Complaining of his favours; pain, and death?Who, without Pain’s advice, would e’er be good?Who, without Death, but would be good in vain?Pain is to save from pain; all punishment,380To make for peace; and death, to save from Death;And second death, to guard immortal life;To rouse the careless, the presumptuous awe,And turn the tide of souls another way;By the same tenderness divine ordain’d,That planted Eden, and high bloom’d for man,A fairer Eden, endless, in the skies.Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene;Resumes them, to prepare us for the next.All evils natural are moral goods;390All discipline, indulgence, on the whole.None are unhappy: all have cause to smile,But such as to themselves that cause deny.393Our faults are at the bottom of our pains;Error, in act, or judgment, is the sourceOf endless sighs: we sin, or we mistake;And Nature tax, when false opinion stings.Let impious grief be banish’d, joy indulged;But chiefly then, when Grief puts in her claim.Joy from the joyous, frequently betrays,400Oft lives in vanity, and dies in woe.Joy, amidst ills, corroborates, exalts;’Tis joy and conquest; joy, and virtue too.A noble fortitude in ills, delightsHeaven, earth, ourselves; ’tis duty, glory, peace.Affliction is the good man’s shining scene;Prosperity conceals his brightest ray;As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.Heroes in battle, pilots in the storm,And virtue in calamities, admire.410The crown of manhood is a winter-joy;An evergreen, that stands the northern blast,And blossoms in the rigour of our fate.’Tis a prime part of happiness, to knowHow much unhappiness must prove our lot;A part which few possess! I’ll pay life’s tax,Without one rebel murmur, from this hour,Nor think it misery to be a man;Who thinks it is, shall never be a god.Some ills we wish for, when we wish to live.420What spoke proud Passion?—“Wish my being lost?”[53]Presumptuous! blasphemous! absurd! and false!The triumph of my soul is,—that I am;And therefore that I may be—what? Lorenzo!Look inward, and look deep; and deeper still;Unfathomably deep our treasure runs426In golden veins, through all eternity!Ages, and ages, and succeeding stillNew ages, where the phantom of an hour,Which courts each night, dull slumber, for repair,Shall wake, and wonder, and exult, and praise,And fly through infinite, and all unlock;And (if deserved) by Heaven’s redundant love,433Made half adorable itself, adore;And find, in adoration, endless joy!Where thou, not master of a moment here,Frail as the flower, and fleeting as the gale,May’st boast a whole eternity, enrich’dWith all a kind Omnipotence can pour.Since Adam fell, no mortal, uninspired,440Has ever yet conceived, or ever shall,How kind is God, how great (if good) is Man.No man too largely from Heaven’s love can hope,If what is hoped he labours to secure.Ills?—there are none: All-gracious! none from thee;From man full many! numerous is the raceOf blackest ills, and those immortal too,Begot by Madness, on fair Liberty;Heaven’s daughter, hell-debauch’d! her hand aloneUnlocks destruction to the sons of men,450First barr’d by thine: high-wall’d with adamant,Guarded with terrors reaching to this world,And cover’d with the thunders of thy law;Whose threats are mercies, whose injunctions, guides,Assisting, not restraining, Reason’s choice;Whose sanctions, unavoidable resultsFrom nature’s course, indulgently reveal’d;If unreveal’d, more dangerous, nor less sure.Thus, an indulgent father warns his sons,“Do this; fly that”—nor always tells the cause;460Pleased to reward, as duty to his will,A conduct needful to their own repose.Great God of wonders! (if, thy love survey’d,Aught else the name of wonderful retains),What rocks are these, on which to build our trust!Thy ways admit no blemish; none I find;Or this alone—“That none is to be found.”Not one, to soften Censure’s hardy crime;Not one, to palliate peevish Grief’s Complaint,Who, like a demon, murmuring from the dust,470Dares into judgment call her Judge.—Supreme!For all I bless thee; most, for the severe;Her[54]death—my own at hand—the fiery gulf,That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent!It thunders;—but it thunders to preserve;It strengthens what it strikes; its wholesome dreadAverts the dreaded pain; its hideous groansJoin heaven’s sweet hallelujahs in thy praise,Great Source of good alone! how kind in all!In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save.480Thus, in thy world material, Mighty Mind!Not that alone which solaces, and shines,The rough and gloomy, challenges our praise.The winter is as needful as the spring;The thunder, as the sun; a stagnate massOf vapours breeds a pestilential air:Nor more propitious the Favonian[55]breezeTo nature’s health, than purifying storms;The dread volcano ministers to good.Its smother’d flames might undermine the world.490Loud Etnas fulminate in love to man;Comets good omens are, when duly scann’d;492And, in their use, eclipses learn to shine.Man is responsible for ills received;Those we call wretched are a chosen band,Compell’d to refuge in the right, for peace.Amid my list of blessings infinite,Stands this the foremost, “That my heart has bled.”’Tis Heaven’s last effort of good-will to man;When Pain can’t bless, Heaven quits us in despair.500Who fails to grieve, when just occasion calls,Or grieves too much, deserves not to be blest;Inhuman, or effeminate, his heart;Reason absolves the grief, which reason ends.May Heaven ne’er trust my friend with happiness,Till it has taught him how to bear it well,By previous pain; and made it safe to smile!Such smiles are mine, and such may they remain;Nor hazard their extinction, from excess.My change of heart a change of style demands;510The Consolation cancels the Complaint,And makes a convert of my guilty song.As when o’er-labour’d, and inclined to breathe,A panting traveller, some rising ground,Some small ascent, has gain’d, he turns him round,And measures with his eye the various vales,The fields, woods, meads, and rivers, he has pass’d;And, satiate of his journey, thinks of home,Endear’d by distance, nor affects more toil;Thus I, though small, indeed, is that ascent520The Muse has gain’d, review the paths she trod;Various, extensive, beaten but by view;And, conscious of her prudence in repose,Pause; and with pleasure meditate an end,Though still remote; so fruitful is my theme.Through many a field of moral, and divine,526The Muse has stray’d; and much of sorrow seenIn human ways; and much of false and vain;Which none, who travel this bad road, can miss.O’er friends deceased full heartily she wept;Of love divine the wonders she display’d;Proved man immortal; show’d the source of joyThe grand tribunal raised; assign’d the boundsOf human grief: in few, to close the whole,The moral Muse has shadow’d out a sketch,Though not in form, nor with a Raphael-stroke,Of most our weakness needs believe, or do,In this our land of travel, and of hope,For peace on earth, or prospect of the skies.539What then remains? much! much! a mighty debtTo be discharged: these thoughts, O Night! are thine;From thee they came, like lovers’ secret sighs,While others slept. So, Cynthia (poets feign),In shadows veil’d, soft-sliding from her sphere,Her shepherd cheer’d; of her enamour’d less,Than I of thee.—And art thou still unsung,Beneath whose brow, and by whose aid, I sing?Immortal silence! where shall I begin?Where end? or how steal music from the spheres,To soothe their goddess?550O majestic Night!Nature’s great ancestor! Day’s elder-born!And fated to survive the transient sun!By mortals, and immortals, seen with awe!A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,An azure zone thy waist; clouds, in heaven’s loomWrought through varieties of shape and shade,In ample folds of drapery divine,Thy flowing mantle form; and, heaven throughout,Voluminously pour thy pompous train.560Thy gloomy grandeurs (nature’s most august,Inspiring aspect!) claim a grateful verse;And, like a sable curtain starr’d with gold,Drawn o’er my labours past, shall close the scene.And what, O man! so worthy to be sung?What more prepares us for the songs of heaven?Creation, of archangels is the theme!What, to be sung, so needful? What so wellCelestial joys prepare us to sustain?The soul of man, His face design’d to see,570Who gave these wonders to be seen by man,Has here a previous scene of objects great,On which to dwell; to stretch to that expanseOf thought, to rise to that exalted heightOf admiration, to contract that awe,And give her whole capacities that strength,Which best may qualify for final joy.The more our spirits are enlarged on earth,The deeper draught shall they receive of heaven.Heaven’s King! whose face unveil’d consummates bliss;Redundant bliss! which fills that mighty void,581The whole creation leaves in human hearts!Thou, who didst touch the lip of Jesse’s son,Rapt in sweet contemplation of these fires,And set his harp in concert with the spheres;While of thy works material the supremeI dare attempt, assist my daring song.Loose me from earth’s enclosure, from the sun’sContracted circle set my heart at large;Eliminate my spirit, give it range590Through provinces of thought yet unexplored;Teach me, by this stupendous scaffolding,Creation’s golden steps, to climb to Thee.Teach me with Art great Nature to control,594And spread a lustre o’er the shades of Night.Feel I thy kind assent? and shall the sunBe seen at midnight, rising in my song?Lorenzo! come, and warm thee: thou, whose heart,Whose little heart, is moor’d within a nookOf this obscure terrestrial, anchor weigh.Another ocean calls, a nobler port;I am thy pilot, I thy prosperous gale.602Gainful thy voyage through yon azure main;Main, without tempest, pirate, rock, or shore;And whence thou may’st import eternal wealth;And leave to beggar’d minds the pearl and gold.Thy travels dost thou boast o’er foreign realms?Thou stranger to the world! thy tour begin;Thy tour through Nature’s universal orb.Nature delineates her whole chart at large,610On soaring souls, that sail among the spheres;And man how purblind, if unknown the whole!Who circles spacious earth, then travels here,Shall own, he never was from home before!Come, my Prometheus,[56]from thy pointed rockOf false ambition; if unchain’d, we’ll mount;We’ll, innocently, steal celestial fire,And kindle our devotion at the stars;A theft, that shall not chain, but set thee free.Above our atmosphere’s intestine[57]wars,620Rain’s fountain-head, the magazine of hail;Above the northern nests of feather’d snows,The brew of thunders, and the flaming forgeThat forms the crooked lightning; ’bove the cavesWhere infant tempests wait their growing wings,And tune their tender voices to that roar,Which soon, perhaps, shall shake a guilty world;627Above misconstrued omens of the sky,Far-travell’d comets’ calculated blaze;Elance[58]thy thought, and think of more than man.Thy soul, till now, contracted, wither’d, shrunk,Blighted by blasts of earth’s unwholesome air,Will blossom here; spread all her facultiesTo these bright ardours; every power unfold,And rise into sublimities of thought.Stars teach, as well as shine. At Nature’s birth,Thus their commission ran—“Be kind to Man.”Where art thou, poor benighted traveller?The stars will light thee, though the moon should fail.Where art thou, more benighted! more astray!640In ways immoral? The stars call thee back;And, if obey’d their counsel, set thee right.This prospect vast, what is it?—Weigh’d aright,’Tis Nature’s system of divinity,And every student of the Night inspires.’Tis elder Scripture, writ by God’s own hand:Scripture authentic! uncorrupt by man.Lorenzo! with my radius (the rich giftOf thought nocturnal!) I’ll point out to theeIts various lessons; some that may surprise650An un-adept in mysteries of Night;Little, perhaps, expected in her school,Nor thought to grow on planet, or on star.Bulls, lions, scorpions, monsters here we feign;Ourselves more monstrous, not to see what hereExists indeed;—a lecture to mankind.What read we here?—Th’ existence of a God?Yes; and of other beings, man above;Natives of ether! sons of higher climes!And, what may move Lorenzo’s wonder more,660Eternity is written in the skies.661And whose eternity?—Lorenzo! thineMankind’s eternity. Nor Faith alone,Virtue grows here; here springs the sovereign cureOf almost every vice; but chiefly thine;Wrath, Pride, Ambition, and impure Desire.Lorenzo! thou canst wake at midnight too,Though not on morals bent: Ambition, Pleasure!Those tyrants I for thee so lately fought,[59]Afford their harass’d slaves but slender rest.670Thou, to whom midnight is immoral noon,And the sun’s noontide blaze, prime dawn of day;Not by thy climate, but capricious crime,Commencing one of our antipodes!In thy nocturnal rove, one moment halt,’Twixt stage and stage, of riot, and cabal;And lift thine eye (if bold an eye to lift,If bold to meet the face of injured Heaven)To yonder stars: for other ends they shine,Than to light revellers from shame to shame,680And, thus, be made accomplices in guilt.Why from yon arch, that infinite of space,With infinite of lucid orbs replete,Which set the living firmament on fire,At the first glance, in such an overwhelmOf wonderful, on man’s astonish’d sight,Rushes Omnipotence—To curb our pride;Our reason rouse, and lead it to that Power,Whose love lets down these silver chains of light;To draw up man’s ambition to Himself,690And bind our chaste affections to His throne.Thus the three virtues, least alive on earth,And welcomed on heaven’s coast with most applause,An humble, pure, and heavenly-minded heart,694Are here inspired:—and canst thou gaze too long?Nor stands thy wrath deprived of its reproof,Or un-upbraided by this radiant choir.The planets of each system representKind neighbours; mutual amity prevails;Sweet interchange of rays, received, return’d;Enlightening, and enlighten’d! all, at once,Attracting, and attracted! Patriot like,702None sins against the welfare of the whole;But their reciprocal, unselfish aid,Affords an emblem of millennial love.Nothing in nature, much less conscious being,Was e’er created solely for itself:Thus man his sovereign duty learns in thisMaterial picture of benevolence.And know, of all our supercilious race,710Thou most inflammable! thou wasp of men!Man’s angry heart, inspected, would be foundAs rightly set, as are the starry spheres;’Tis Nature’s structure, broke by stubborn will,Breeds all that uncelestial discord there.Wilt thou not feel the bias Nature gave?Canst thou descend from converse with the skies,And seize thy brother’s throat?—For what—a clod,An inch of earth? The planets cry, “Forbear!”They chase our double darkness; Nature’s gloom,720And (kinder still!) our intellectual night.And see, Day’s amiable sister sendsHer invitation, in the softest raysOf mitigated lustre; courts thy sight,Which suffers from her tyrant brother’s blaze.Night grants thee the full freedom of the skies,Nor rudely reprimands thy lifted eye;With gain, and joy, she bribes thee to be wise.728Night opes the noblest scenes, and sheds an awe,Which gives those venerable scenes full weight,And deep reception, in th’ intender’d heart;While light peeps through the darkness, like a spy;And darkness shows its grandeur by the light.Nor is the profit greater than the joy,If human hearts at glorious objects glow,And admiration can inspire delight.What speak I more, than I, this moment, feel?With pleasing stupor first the soul is struck(Stupor ordain’d to make her truly wise!):Then into transport starting from her trance,740With love, and admiration, how she glows!This gorgeous apparatus! this display!This ostentation of creative power!This theatre!—what eye can take it in?By what divine enchantment was it raised,For minds of the first magnitude to launchIn endless speculation, and adore?One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine;And light us deep into the Deity;How boundless in magnificence and might!750O what a confluence of ethereal fires,Form urns unnumber’d, down the steep of heaven,Streams to a point, and centres in my sight!Nor tarries there; I feel it at my heart.My heart, at once, it humbles, and exalts;Lays it in dust, and calls it to the skies.Who sees it unexalted? or unawed?Who sees it, and can stop at what is seen?Material offspring of Omnipotence!Inanimate, all-animating birth!760Work worthy Him who made it! worthy praise!All praise! praise more than human! nor denied762Thy praise divine!—But though man, drown’d in sleep,Withholds his homage, not alone I wake;Bright legions swarm unseen, and sing, unheardBy mortal ear, the glorious Architect,In this His universal temple hungWith lustres, with innumerable lights,That shed religion on the soul; at once,The temple, and the preacher! O how loud770It calls devotion! genuine growth of Night!Devotion! daughter of Astronomy!An undevout astronomer is mad.True; all things speak a God; but in the small,Men trace out Him; in great, He seizes man;Seizes, and elevates, and wraps, and fillsWith new inquiries, ’mid associates new.Tell me, ye stars! ye planets! tell me, allYe starr’d, and planeted, inhabitants! what is it?What are these sons of wonder? say, proud arch780(Within those azure palaces they dwell),Built with divine ambition! in disdainOf limit built! built in the taste of heaven!Vast concave! ample dome! wast thou design’dA meet apartment for the Deity?—Not so; that thought alone thy state impairs,Thy lofty sinks, and shallows thy profound,And straitens thy diffusive; dwarfs the whole,And makes a universe an orrery[60].But when I drop mine eye, and look on man,790Thy right regain’d, thy grandeur is restored,O Nature! wide flies off th’ expanding round.As when whole magazines, at once, are fired,The smitten air is hollow’d by the blow;The vast displosion dissipates the clouds;Shock’d ether’s billows dash the distant skies;796Thus (but far more) th’ expanding round flies off,And leaves a mighty void, a spacious womb,Might teem with new creation; reinflamedThy luminaries triumph, and assumeDivinity themselves. Nor was it strange,Matter high-wrought to such surprising pomp,Such godlike glory, stole the style of gods,803From ages dark, obtuse, and steep’d in sense;For, sure, to sense, they truly are divine,And half absolved idolatry from guilt;Nay, turn’d it into virtue. Such it wasIn those, who put forth all they had of manUnlost, to lift their thought, nor mounted higher;But, weak of wing, on planets perch’d; and thought810What was their highest, must be their adored.But they how weak, who could no higher mount?And are there, then, Lorenzo! those, to whomUnseen, and unexistent, are the same?And if incomprehensible is join’d,Who dare pronounce it madness, to believe?Why has the mighty Builder thrown asideAll measure in His work; stretch’d out His lineSo far, and spread amazement o’er the whole?Then (as he took delight in wide extremes),820Deep in the bosom of His universe,Dropp’d down that reasoning mite, that insect, Man,To crawl, and gaze, and wonder at the scene?—That man might ne’er presume to plead amazementFor disbelief of wonders in himself.Shall God be less miraculous, than whatHis hand has form’d? Shall mysteries descendFrom unmysterious? things more elevate,Be more familiar? uncreated lieMore obvious than created, to the grasp830Of human thought? The more of wonderfulIs heard in Him, the more we should assent.Could we conceive Him, God He could not be;Or He not God, or we could not be men.A God alone can comprehend a God;Man’s distance how immense! On such a theme,Know this, Lorenzo! (seem it ne’er so strange)Nothing can satisfy, but what confounds;Nothing, but what astonishes, is true.The scene thou seest, attests the truth I sing,840And every star sheds light upon thy creed.These stars, this furniture, this cost of heaven,If but reported, thou hadst ne’er believed;But thine eye tells thee, the romance is true.The grand of nature is th’ Almighty’s oath,In Reason’s court, to silence Unbelief.How my mind, opening at this scene, imbibesThe moral emanations of the skies,While nought, perhaps, Lorenzo less admires!Has the Great Sovereign sent ten thousand worlds850To tells us, He resides above them all,In glory’s unapproachable recess?And dare earth’s bold inhabitants denyThe sumptuous, the magnific embassyA moment’s audience? Turn we, nor will hearFrom whom they come, or what they would impartFor man’s emolument; sole cause that stoopsTheir grandeur to man’s eye? Lorenzo! rouse;Let thought, awaken’d, take the lightning’s wing,And glance from east to west, from pole to pole.860Who sees, but is confounded, or convinced?Renounces reason, or a God adores?Mankind was sent into the world to see:Sight gives the science needful to their peace;864That obvious science asks small learning’s aid.Would’st thou on metaphysic pinions soar?Or wound thy patience amid logic thorns?Or travel history’s enormous round?Nature no such hard task enjoins: she gaveA make to man directive of his thought;A make set upright, pointing to the stars,As who shall say, “Read thy chief lesson there.”872Too late to read this manuscript of heaven,When, like a parchment scroll, shrunk up by flames,It folds Lorenzo’s lesson from his sight.Lesson how various! Not the God alone,I see His ministers; I see, diffusedIn radiant orders, essences sublime,Of various offices, of various plume,In heavenly liveries, distinctly clad,880Azure, green, purple, pearl, or downy gold,Or all commix’d; they stand, with wings outspread,Listening to catch the Master’s least command,And fly through nature, ere the moment ends;Numbers innumerable!—well conceivedBy Pagan, and by Christian! O’er each spherePresides an angel, to direct its course,And feed, or fan, its flames; or to dischargeOther high trusts unknown. For who can seeSuch pomp of matter, and imagine, Mind,890For which alone Inanimate was made,More sparingly dispensed? that nobler son,Far liker the great Sire!—’Tis thus the skiesInform us of superiors numberless,As much, in excellence, above mankind,As above earth, in magnitude, the spheres.These, as a cloud of witnesses, hang o’er us;In a throng’d theatre are all our deeds;898Perhaps, a thousand demigods descendOn every beam we see, to walk with men.Awful reflection! Strong restraint from ill!Yet, here, our virtue finds still stronger aidFrom these ethereal glories sense surveys.Something, like magic, strikes from this blue vault;With just attention is it view’d? We feelA sudden succour, unimplored, unthought;Nature herself does half the work of Man.Seas, rivers, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks,The promontory’s height, the depth profoundOf subterranean, excavated grots[61],910Black brow’d, and vaulted high, and yawning wideFrom Nature’s structure, or the scoop of Time;If ample of dimension, vast of size,Even these an aggrandizing impulse give;Of solemn thought enthusiastic heightsEven these infuse.—But what of vast in these?Nothing;—or we must own the skies forgot.Much less in art.—Vain art! Thou pigmy power!How dost thou swell and strut, with human pride,To show thy littleness! What childish toys,920Thy watery columns squirted to the clouds!Thy basin’d rivers, and imprison’d seas!Thy mountains moulded into forms of men!Thy hundred-gated capitals! or thoseWhere three days’ travel left us much to ride;Gazing on miracles by mortals wrought,Arches triumphal, theatres immense,Or nodding gardens pendent in mid-air!Or temples proud to meet their gods half-way!Yet these affect us in no common kind.930What then the force of such superior scenes?Enter a temple, it will strike an awe:932What awe from this the Deity has built!A good man seen, though silent, counsel gives:The touch’d spectator wishes to be wise:In a bright mirror His own hands have made,Here we see something like the face of God.Seems it not then enough, to say, Lorenzo!To man abandon’d, “Hast thou seen the skies?”And yet, so thwarted Nature’s kind design940By daring man, he makes her sacred awe(That guard from ill) his shelter, his temptationTo more than common guilt, and quite invertsCelestial art’s intent. The trembling starsSee crimes gigantic, stalking through the gloomWith front erect, that hide their head by day,And making night still darker by their deeds.Slumbering in covert, till the shades descend,Rapine and Murder, link’d, now prowl for prey.The miser earths his treasure; and the thief,950Watching the mole, half beggars him ere morn.Now plots, and foul conspiracies, awake;And, muffling up their horrors from the moon,Havoc and devastation they prepare,And kingdoms tottering in the field of blood.Now sons of riot in mid-revel rage.What shall I do?—suppress it? or proclaim?—Why sleeps the thunder? Now, Lorenzo! now,His best friend’s couch the rank adultererAscends secure; and laughs at gods and men.960Preposterous madmen, void of fear or shame,Lay their crimes bare to these chaste eyes of Heaven;Yet shrink, and shudder, at a mortal’s sight.Were moon, and stars, for villains only made?To guide, yet screen them, with tenebrious[62]light?No; they were made to fashion the sublime966Of human hearts, and wiser make the wise.Those ends were answer’d once; when mortals livedOf stronger wing, of aquiline ascentIn theory sublime. O how unlikeThose vermin of the night, this moment sung,Who crawl on earth, and on her venom feed!972Those ancient sages, human stars! They metTheir brothers of the skies, at midnight hour;Their counsel ask’d; and, what they ask’d, obey’d.The Stagirite, and Plato, he who drank[63]The poison’d bowl, and he of Tusculum,[64]With him of Corduba,[65](immortal names!)In these unbounded, and Elysian, walks,An area fit for gods, and godlike men,980They took their nightly round, through radiant pathsBy seraphs trod; instructed, chiefly, thus,To tread in their bright footsteps here below;To walk in worth still brighter than the skies.There they contracted their contempt of earth;Of hopes eternal kindled, there, the fire;There, as in near approach, they glow’d, and grew(Great visitants!) more intimate with God,More worth to men, more joyous to themselves.Through various virtues, they, with ardour, ran990The zodiac of their learn’d, illustrious lives.In Christian hearts, O for a Pagan zeal!A needful, but opprobrious prayer! As muchOur ardour less, as greater is our light.How monstrous this in morals! Scarce more strangeWould this phenomenon in nature strike,A sun, that froze her, or a star, that warm’d.What taught these heroes of the moral world?998To these thou givest thy praise, give credit too.These doctors ne’er were pension’d to deceive thee;And Pagan tutors are thy taste.—They taught,That, narrow views betray to misery:That, wise it is to comprehend the whole:That, virtue, rose from nature, ponder’d well,The single base of virtue built to heaven:That God, and nature, our attention claim:That nature is the glass reflecting God,As, by the sea, reflected is the sun,Too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere:That, mind immortal loves immortal aims:1010That, boundless mind affects a boundless space:That vast surveys, and the sublime of things,The soul assimilate, and make her great:That, therefore, heaven her glories, as a fundOf inspiration, thus spreads out to man.Such are their doctrines; such the Night inspired.And what more true? what truth of greater weight?The soul of man was made to walk the skies;Delightful outlet of her prison here!There, disencumber’d from her chains, the ties1020Of toys terrestrial, she can rove at large;There, freely can respire, dilate, extend,In full proportion let loose all her powers;And, undeluded, grasp at something great.Nor, as a stranger, does she wander there;But, wonderful herself, through wonder strays;Contemplating their grandeur, finds her own;Dives deep in their economy divine,Sits high in judgment on their various laws,And, like a master, judges not amiss.1030Hence greatly pleased, and justly proud, the soulGrows conscious of her birth celestial; breathes1032More life, more vigour, in her native air;And feels herself at home amongst the stars;And, feeling, emulates her country’s praise.What call we, then, the firmament, Lorenzo?—As earth the body, since the skies sustainThe soul with food, that gives immortal life,Call it, the noble pasture of the mind;Which there expatiates, strengthens, and exults,1040And riots through the luxuries of thought.Call it, the garden of the Deity,Blossom’d with stars, redundant in the growthOf fruit ambrosial; moral fruit to man.Call it, the breastplate of the true High Priest,Ardent with gems oracular, that give,In points of highest moment, right response;And ill neglected, if we prize our peace.Thus, have we found a true astrology;Thus, have we found a new, and noble sense,1050In which alone stars govern human fates.O that the stars (as some have feign’d) let fallBloodshed, and havoc, on embattled realms,And rescued monarchs from so black a guilt!Bourbon! this wish how generous in a foe!Would’st thou be great, would’st thou become a god,And stick thy deathless name among the stars,For mighty conquests on a needle’s point?Instead of forging chains for foreigners,Bastile thy tutor: grandeur all thy aim?1060As yet thou know’st not what it is: how great,How glorious, then, appears the mind of man,When in it all the stars, and planets, roll!And what it seems, it is: great objects makeGreat minds, enlarging as their views enlarge;1065Those still more godlike, as these more divine.And more divine than these, thou canst not see.Dazzled, o’erpower’d, with the delicious draughtOf miscellaneous splendours, how I reelFrom thought to thought, inebriate, without end!An Eden, this! a Paradise unlost!I meet the Deity in every view,1072And tremble at my nakedness before him!O that I could but reach the tree of life!For here it grows, unguarded from our taste;No flaming sword denies our entrance here;Would man but gather, he might live for ever.Lorenzo! much of moral hast thou seen.Of curious arts art thou more fond? Then markThe mathematic glories of the skies,1080In number, weight, and measure, all ordain’d.Lorenzo’s boasted builders, Chance, and Fate,Are left to finish his aërial towers;Wisdom and choice, their well-known charactersHere deep impress; and claim it for their own.Though splendid all, no splendour void of use;Use rivals beauty; art contends with power;No wanton waste, amid effuse expense;The great Economist adjusting allTo prudent pomp, magnificently wise.1090How rich the prospect! and for ever new!And newest to the man that views it most;For newer still in infinite succeeds.Then, these aërial racers, O how swift!How the shaft loiters from the strongest string!Spirit alone can distance the career.Orb above orb ascending without end!Circle in circle, without end, enclosed!Wheel, within wheel; Ezekiel! like to thine!1099Like thine, it seems a vision or a dream;Though seen, we labour to believe it true!What involution! what extent! what swarmsOf worlds, that laugh at earth! immensely great!Immensely distant from each other’s spheres!What, then, the wondrous space through which they roll?At once it quite engulfs all human thought;’Tis comprehension’s absolute defeat.Nor think thou seest a wild disorder here;Through this illustrious chaos to the sight,Arrangement neat, and chastest order, reign.1110The path prescribed, inviolably kept,Upbraids the lawless sallies of mankind.Worlds, ever thwarting, never interfere;What knots are tied! how soon are they dissolved,And set the seeming married planets free!They rove for ever, without error rove;Confusion unconfused! nor less admireThis tumult untumultuous; all on wing!In motion, all! yet what profound repose!What fervid action, yet no noise! as awed1120To silence, by the presence of their Lord;Or hush’d by His command, in love to man,And bid let fall soft beams on human rest,Restless themselves. On yon cerulean plain,In exultation to their God, and thine,They dance, they sing eternal jubilee,Eternal celebration of His praise.But, since their song arrives not at our ear,Their dance perplex’d exhibits to the sightFair hieroglyphic of His peerless power.1130Mark how the labyrinthian turns they take,The circles intricate, and mystic maze,Weave the grand cipher of Omnipotence;1133To gods, how great! how legible to man!Leaves so much wonder greater wonder still?Where are the pillars that support the skies?What more than Atlantean shoulder propsTh’ incumbent load? What magic, what strange art,In fluid air these ponderous orbs sustains?Who would not think them hung in golden chains?—1140And so they are; in the high will of heaven,Which fixes all; makes adamant of air,Or air of adamant; makes all of nought,Or nought of all; if such the dread decree.Imagine from their deep foundations tornThe most gigantic sons of earth, the broadAnd towering Alps, all toss’d into the sea;And, light as down, or volatile as air,Their bulks enormous, dancing on the waves,In time, and measure, exquisite; while all1150The winds, in emulation of the spheres,Tune their sonorous instruments aloft;The concert swell, and animate the ball.Would this appear amazing? What, then, worlds,In a far thinner element sustain’d,And acting the same part, with greater skill,More rapid movement, and for noblest ends?More obvious ends to pass, are not these starsThe seats majestic, proud imperial thrones,On which angelic delegates of heaven,1160At certain periods, as the Sovereign nods,Discharge high trusts of vengeance, or of love;To clothe, in outward grandeur, grand design,And acts most solemn still more solemnize?Ye citizens of air! what ardent thanks,What full effusion of the grateful heart,Is due from man indulged in such a sight!1167A sight so noble! and a sight so kind!It drops new truths at every new survey!Feels not Lorenzo something stir within,That sweeps away all period? As these spheresMeasure duration, they no less inspireThe godlike hope of ages without end.The boundless space, through which these rovers takeTheir restless roam, suggests the sister thoughtOf boundless time. Thus, by kind Nature’s skill,To man unlabour’d, that important guest,Eternity, finds entrance at the sight:And an eternity, for man ordain’d,Or these his destined midnight counsellors,1180The stars, had never whisper’d it to man.Nature informs, but ne’er insults, her sons.Could she then kindle the most ardent wishTo disappoint it?—That is blasphemy.Thus, of thy creed a second article,Momentous, as th’ existence of a God,Is found (as I conceive) where rarely sought;And thou may’st read thy soul immortal, here.Here, then, Lorenzo! on these glories dwell;Nor want the gilt, illuminated, roof,1190That calls the wretched gay to dark delights.Assemblies?—This is one divinely bright;Here, unendanger’d in health, wealth, or fame,Range through the fairest, and the Sultan scorn;He, wise as thou, no crescent holds so fair,As that, which on his turban awes a world;And thinks the moon is proud to copy him.Look on her, and gain more than worlds can give,A mind superior to the charms of power.Thou muffled in delusions of this life!1200Can yonder moon turn ocean in his bed,1201From side to side, in constant ebb, and flow,And purify from stench his watery realms?And fails her moral influence? wants she powerTo turn Lorenzo’s stubborn tide of thoughtFrom stagnating on earth’s infected shore,And purge from nuisance his corrupted heart?Fails her attraction when it draws to heaven?Nay, and to what thou valuest more, earth’s joy?Minds elevate, and panting for unseen,1210And defecate[66]from sense, alone obtainFull relish of existence undeflower’d,The life of life, the zest of worldly bliss:All else on earth amounts—to what? to this:“Bad to be suffer’d; blessings to be left:”Earth’s richest inventory boasts no more.Of higher scenes be, then, the call obey’d.O let me gaze!—Of gazing there’s no end.O let me think!—Thought too is wilder’d here;In midway flight imagination tires;1220Yet soon reprunes her wing to soar anew,Her point unable to forbear, or gain;So great the pleasure, so profound the plan!A banquet, this, where men, and angels, meet,Eat the same manna, mingle earth and heaven.How distant some of these nocturnal suns!So distant (says the sage), ’twere not absurdTo doubt, if beams, set out at Nature’s birth,Are yet arrived at this so foreign world;Though nothing half so rapid as their flight.1230An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,And roll for ever: who can satiate sightIn such a scene? in such an ocean wideOf deep astonishment? where depth, height, breadth,Are lost in their extremes; and where to count1235The thick-sown glories in this field of fire,Perhaps a seraph’s computation fails.Now, go, Ambition! boast thy boundless mightIn conquest, o’er the tenth part of a grain.And yet Lorenzo calls for miracles,To give his tottering faith a solid base.Why call for less than is already thine?1242Thou art no novice in theology;What is a miracle?—’Tis a reproach,’Tis an implicit satire, on mankind;And while it satisfies, it censures too.To common sense, great Nature’s course proclaimsA Deity: when mankind falls asleep,A miracle is sent, as an alarm;To wake the world, and prove Him o’er again,1250By recent argument, but not more strong.Say, which imports more plenitude of power,Or nature’s laws to fix, or to repeal?To make a sun, or stop his mid career?To countermand his orders, and send backThe flaming courier to the frighted east,Warm’d, and astonish’d, at his evening ray?Or bid the moon, as with her journey tired,In Ajalon’s[67]soft, flowery vale repose?Great things are these; still greater, to create.1260From Adam’s bower look down through the whole trainOf miracles;—resistless is their power?They do not, can not, more amaze the mind,Than this, call’d unmiraculous survey,If duly weigh’d, if rationally seen,If seen with human eyes. The brute, indeed,Sees nought but spangles here; the fool, no more.Say’st thou, “The course of nature governs all?”The course of Nature is the art of God.1269The miracles thou call’st for, this attest;For say, could Nature Nature’s course control?But, miracles apart, who sees Him not,Nature’s controller, author, guide, and end?Who turns his eye on Nature’s midnight face,But must inquire—“What hand behind the scene,What arm almighty, put these wheeling globesIn motion, and wound up the vast machine?Who rounded in his palm these spacious orbs?Who bowl’d them flaming through the dark profound,Numerous as glittering gems of morning dew,1280Or sparks from populous cities in a blaze,And set the bosom of old Night on fire?Peopled her desert, and made horror smile?”Or, if the military style delights thee(For stars have fought their battles, leagued with man),“Who marshals this bright host? enrols their names?Appoints their posts, their marches, and returns,Punctual, at stated periods? who disbandsThese veteran troops, their final duty done,If e’er disbanded?”—He, whose potent word,1290Like the loud trumpet, levied first their powersIn Night’s inglorious empire, where they sleptIn beds of darkness: arm’d them with fierce flames,Arranged, and disciplined, and clothed in gold;And call’d them out of chaos to the field,Where now they war with vice and unbelief.O let us join this army! joining these,Will give us hearts intrepid, at that hour,When brighter flames shall cut a darker night;When these strong demonstrations of a God1300Shall hide their heads, or tumble from their spheres,And one eternal curtain cover all!Struck at that thought, as new awaked, I lift1303A more enlighten’d eye, and read the starsTo man still more propitious; and their aid(Though guiltless of idolatry) implore;Nor longer rob them of their noblest name.O ye dividers of my time! ye brightAccountants of my days, and months, and years,In your fair calendar distinctly mark’d!1310Since that authentic, radiant register,Though man inspects it not, stands good against him;Since you, and years, roll on, though man stands still;Teach me my days to number, and applyMy trembling heart to wisdom; now beyondAll shadow of excuse for fooling on.Age smooths our path to prudence; sweeps asideThe snares keen appetite and passion spreadTo catch stray souls; and woe to that grey head,Whose folly would undo, what age has done!1320Aid then, aid, all ye stars!—Much rather, Thou,Great Artist! Thou, whose finger set arightThis exquisite machine, with all its wheels,Though intervolved, exact; and pointing outLife’s rapid, and irrevocable flight,With such an index fair, as none can miss,Who lifts an eye, nor sleeps till it is closed.Open mine eye, dread Deity! to readThe tacit doctrine of thy works; to seeThings as they are, unalter’d through the glass1330Of worldly wishes. Time, eternity!(’Tis these, mismeasured, ruin all mankind)Set them before me; let me lay them bothIn equal scale, and learn their various weight.Let time appear a moment, as it is;And let eternity’s full orb, at once,Turn on my soul, and strike it into heaven.1337When shall I see far more than charms me now?Gaze on creation’s model in thy breastUnveil’d, nor wonder at the transcript more?When this vile, foreign, dust, which smothers allThat travel earth’s deep vale, shall I shake off?When shall my soul her incarnation quit,And, readopted to thy bless’d embrace,Obtain her apotheosis in Thee?Dost think, Lorenzo, this is wandering wide?No,’tis directly striking at the mark;To wake thy dead devotion was my point;And how I bless Night’s consecrating shades,Which to a temple turn an universe;1350Fill us with great ideas, full of heaven,And antidote the pestilential earth!In every storm, that either frowns, or falls,What an asylum has the soul in prayer!And what a fane[68]is this, in which to pray!And what a God must dwell in such a fane!Oh, what a genius must inform the skies!And is Lorenzo’s salamander heartCold, and untouch’d, amid these sacred fires?O ye nocturnal sparks! ye glowing embers,1360On heaven’s broad hearth! who burn, or burn no more,Who blaze, or die, as Great Jehovah’s breathOr blows you, or forbears; assist my song;Pour your whole influence; exorcise his heart,So long possess’d; and bring him back to man.And is Lorenzo a demurrer still?Pride in thy parts provokes thee to contestTruths, which, contested, put thy parts to shame.Nor shame they more Lorenzo’s head than heart,A faithless heart, how despicably small!1370Too strait, aught great or generous to receive!1371Fill’d with an atom! fill’d, and foul’d, with self!And self mistaken! self, that lasts an hour!Instincts and passions, of the nobler kind,Lie suffocated there; or they alone,Reason apart, would wake high hope; and open,To ravish’d thought, that intellectual sphere,Where order, wisdom, goodness, providence,Their endless miracles of love display,And promise all the truly great desire.1380The mind that would be happy, must be great;Great, in its wishes; great, in its surveys.Extended views a narrow mind extend;Push out its corrugate, expansive make,Which, ere long, more than planets shall embrace.A man of compass makes a man of worth;Divine contemplate, and become divine.As man was made for glory, and for bliss,All littleness is in approach to woe;Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,1390And let in manhood; let in happiness;Admit the boundless theatre of thoughtFrom nothing, up to God; which makes a man.Take God from nature, nothing great is left;Man’s mind is in a pit, and nothing sees;Man’s heart is in a jakes[69], and loves the mire.Emerge from thy profound; erect thine eye;See thy distress! how close art thou besieged!Besieged by Nature, the proud sceptic’s foe!Enclosed by these innumerable worlds,1400Sparkling conviction on the darkest mind,As in a golden net of Providence.How art thou caught, sure captive of belief!From this thy bless’d captivity, what art,What blasphemy to reason, sets thee free!1405This scene is heaven’s indulgent violence:Canst thou bear up against this tide of glory?What is earth bosom’d in these ambient orbs,But, faith in God imposed, and press’d on man?Darest thou still litigate thy desperate cause,Spite of these numerous, awful, witnesses,And doubt the deposition of the skies?1412O how laborious is thy way to ruin!Laborious! ’tis impracticable quite;To sink beyond a doubt, in this debate,With all his weight of wisdom and of will,And crime flagitious, I defy a fool.Some wish they did; but no man disbelieves.God is a spirit; spirit cannot strikeThese gross, material organs; God by man1420As much is seen, as man a God can see,In these astonishing exploits of power.What order, beauty, motion, distance, size!Concertion of design, how exquisite!How complicate, in their divine police!Apt means! great ends! consent to general good!—Each attribute of these material gods,So long (and that with specious pleas) adored,A separate conquest gains o’er rebel thought;And leads in triumph the whole mind of man.1430Lorenzo! this may seem harangue to thee;Such all is apt to seem, that thwarts our will.And dost thou, then, demand a simple proofOf this great master moral of the skies,Unskill’d, or disinclined, to read it there?Since ’tis the basis, and all drops without it,Take it, in one compact, unbroken chain.Such proof insists on an attentive ear;’Twill not make one amid a mob of thoughts,1439And, for thy notice, struggle with the world.Retire;—the world shut out;—thy thoughts call home;—Imagination’s airy wing repress;—Lock up thy senses;—let no passion stir;—Wake all to Reason;—let her reign alone;—Then, in thy soul’s deep silence, and the depthOf Nature’s silence, midnight, thus inquire,As I have done; and shall inquire no more.In nature’s channel, thus the questions run:“What am I? and from whence?—I nothing know,But that I am; and, since I am, conclude1450Something eternal: had there e’er been nought,Nought still had been: eternal there must be.—But what eternal?—Why not human race?And Adam’s ancestors without an end?—That’s hard to be conceived; since every linkOf that long-chain’d succession is so frail;Can every part depend, and not the whole?Yet grant it true; new difficulties rise;I’m still quite out at sea; nor see the shore.Whence earth, and these bright orbs?—eternal too?Grant matter was eternal; still these orbs1461Would want some other father;—much designIs seen in all their motions, all their makes;Design implies intelligence, and art;That can’t be from themselves—or man; that artMan scarce can comprehend, could man bestow?And nothing greater yet allow’d than man.—Who, motion, foreign to the smallest grain,Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?Who bid brute matter’s restive lump assume1470Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?Has matter innate motion? then each atom,Asserting its indisputable right1473To dance, would form an universe of dust:Has matter none? Then whence these glorious formsAnd boundless flights, from shapeless, and reposed?Has matter more than motion? Has it thought,Judgment, and genius? Is it deeply learn’dIn mathematics? Has it framed such laws,Which but to guess, a Newton made immortal?—1480If so, how each sage atom laughs at me,Who think a clod inferior to a man!If art, to form; and counsel, to conduct;And that with greater far than human skill;Resides not in each block;—a Godhead reigns.—Grant, then, invisible, eternal, Mind;That granted, all is solved.—But, granting that,Draw I not o’er me a still darker cloud?Grant I not that which I can ne’er conceive?A being without origin, or end!—1490Hail, human liberty! There is no God—Yet, why? On either scheme that knot subsists;Subsist it must, in God, or human race;If in the last, how many knots beside,Indissoluble all?—Why choose it there,Where, chosen, still subsist ten thousand more?Reject it, where, that chosen, all the restDispersed, leave reason’s whole horizon clear?This is not reason’s dictate; Reason says,Close with the side where one grain turns the scale;—1500What vast preponderance is here! can reasonWith louder voice exclaim—Believe a God?And reason heard, is the sole mark of man.What things impossible must man think true,On any other system! and how strangeTo disbelieve, through mere credulity!”If, in this chain, Lorenzo finds no flaw,1507Let it for ever bind him to belief.And where the link, in which a flaw he finds?And, if a God there is, that God how great!How great that Power, whose providential careThrough these bright orbs’ dark centres darts a ray!Of nature universal threads the whole!And hangs creation, like a precious gem,Though little, on the footstool of his throne!That little gem, how large! A weight let fallFrom a fix’d star, in ages can it reachThis distant earth! Say, then, Lorenzo! where,Where, ends this mighty building? where, beginThe suburbs of creation? where, the wall1520Whose battlements look o’er into the valeOf non-existence! Nothing’s strange abode!Say, at what point of space Jehovah dropp’dHis slacken’d line, and laid his balance by;Weigh’d worlds, and measured infinite, no more?Where, rears His terminating pillar highIts extra-mundane head? and says, to gods,In characters illustrious as the sun,—

As when a traveller, a long day past

In painful search of what he cannot find,

At night’s approach, content with the next cot,

There ruminates, a while, his labour lost;

Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,

And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,

Till the due season calls him to repose:

Thus I, long-travell’d in the ways of men,

And dancing, with the rest, the giddy maze,

Where Disappointment smiles at Hope’s career;10

Warn’d by the languor of life’s evening ray,

At length have housed me in an humble shed;

Where, future wandering banish’d from my thought,

And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,

I chase the moments with a serious song.

Song soothes our pains; and age has pains to soothe.

When age, care, crime, and friends embraced at heart,

Torn from my bleeding breast, and death’s dark shade,

Which hovers o’er me, quench th’ ethereal fire;

Canst thou, O Night! indulge one labour more?20

One labour more indulge! then sleep, my strain!21

Till, haply, waked by Raphael’s golden lyre,

Where night, death, age, care, crime, and sorrow, cease;

To bear a part in everlasting lays;

Though far, far higher set, in aim, I trust,

Symphonious to this humble prelude here.

Has not the Muse asserted pleasures pure,

Like those above; exploding other joys?

Weigh what was urged, Lorenzo! fairly weigh;

And tell me, hast thou cause to triumph still?30

I think, thou wilt forbear a boast so bold.

But if, beneath the favour of mistake,

Thy smile’s sincere; not more sincere can be

Lorenzo’s smile, than my compassion for him.

The sick in body call for aid; the sick

In mind are covetous of more disease;

And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well.

To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure.

When Nature’s blush by Custom is wiped off,

And Conscience, deaden’d by repeated strokes,40

Has into manners naturalized our crimes;

The curse of curses is, our curse to love;

To triumph in the blackness of our guilt

(As Indians glory in the deepest jet),

And throw aside our senses with our peace.

But grant no guilt, no shame, no least alloy;

Grant joy and glory quite unsullied shone;

Yet, still, it ill deserves Lorenzo’s heart.

No joy, no glory, glitters in thy sight,

But, through the thin partition of an hour,50

I see its sables wove by destiny;

And that in sorrow buried; this, in shame;

While howling furies wring the doleful knell;

And Conscience, now so soft thou scarce canst hear54

Her whisper, echoes her eternal peal.

Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;

Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?

How many sleep, who kept the world awake

With lustre, and with noise! has Death proclaim’d

A truce, and hung his sated lance on high?

’Tis brandish’d still; nor shall the present year

Be more tenacious of her human leaf,62

Or spread of feeble life a thinner fall.

But needless monuments to wake the thought;

Life’s gayest scenes speak man’s mortality;

Though in a style more florid, full as plain,

As mausoleums, pyramids, and tombs.

What are our noblest ornaments, but deaths

Turn’d flatterers of life, in paint, or marble,

The well-stain’d canvas, or the featured stone?70

Our fathers grace, or rather haunt, the scene.

Joy peoples her pavilion from the dead.

“Profess’d diversions! cannot these escape?”

Far from it: these present us with a shroud;

And talk of death, like garlands o’er a grave.

As some bold plunderers, for buried wealth,

We ransack tombs for pastime; from the dust

Call up the sleeping hero; bid him tread

The scene for our amusement: how like gods

We sit; and, wrapt in immortality,80

Shed generous tears on wretches born to die;

Their fate deploring, to forget our own!

What all the pomps and triumphs of our lives,

But legacies in blossom? Our lean soil,

Luxuriant grown, and rank in vanities,

From friends interr’d beneath; a rich manure!

Like other worms, we banquet on the dead;

Like other worms, shall we crawl on, nor know88

Our present frailties, or approaching fate?

Lorenzo! such the glories of the world!

What is the world itself? thy world—a grave.

Where is the dust that has not been alive?

The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;

From human mould we reap our daily bread.

The globe around earth’s hollow surface shakes,

And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.

O’er devastation we blind revels keep;

Whole buried towns support the dancer’s heel.

The moist of human frame the sun exhales;

Winds scatter through the mighty void the dry;100

Earth repossesses part of what she gave,

And the freed spirit mounts on wings of fire;

Each element partakes our scatter’d spoils;

As nature, wide, our ruins spread: man’s death

Inhabits all things, but the thought of man.

Nor man alone; his breathing bust expires,

His tomb is mortal; empires die: where, now,

The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty name!

Yet few regard them in this useful light;

Though half our learning is their epitaph.110

When down thy vale, unlock’d by midnight thought,

That loves to wander in thy sunless realms,

O Death! I stretch my view: what visions rise!

What triumphs! toils imperial! arts divine!

In wither’d laurels glide before my sight!

What lengths of far-famed ages, billow’d high

With human agitation, roll along

In unsubstantial images of air!

The melancholy ghosts of dead renown,

Whispering faint echoes of the world’s applause,120

With penitential aspect, as they pass,

All point at earth, and hiss at human pride,122

The wisdom of the wise, and prancings of the great.

But, O Lorenzo! far the rest above,

Of ghastly nature, and enormous size,

One form assaults my sight, and chills my blood,

And shakes my frame. Of one departed world[52]

I see the mighty shadow: oozy wreath

And dismal seaweed crown her; o’er her urn

Reclined, she weeps her desolated realms,130

And bloated sons; and, weeping, prophesies

Another’s dissolution, soon, in flames.

But, like Cassandra, prophesies in vain;

In vain, to many; not, I trust, to thee.

For, know’st thou not, or art thou loath to know,

The great decree, the counsel of the skies?

Deluge and conflagration, dreadful powers!

Prime ministers of vengeance! chain’d in caves

Distinct, apart the giant furies roar;

Apart; or, such their horrid rage for ruin,140

In mutual conflict would they rise, and wage

Eternal war, till one was quite devour’d.

But not for this, ordain’d their boundless rage;

When Heaven’s inferior instruments of wrath,

War, famine, pestilence, are found too weak

To scourge a world for her enormous crimes,

These are let loose, alternate: down they rush,

Swift and tempestuous, from th’ eternal throne,

With irresistible commission arm’d,

The world, in vain corrected, to destroy,150

And ease creation of the shocking scene.

Seest thou, Lorenzo! what depends on man?

The fate of Nature; as for man, her birth.

Earth’s actors change earth’s transitory scenes,

And make creation groan with human guilt.155

How must it groan, in a new deluge whelm’d,

But not of waters! At the destined hour,

By the loud trumpet summon’d to the charge,

See, all the formidable sons of fire,

Eruptions, earthquakes, comets, lightnings, play

Their various engines; all at once disgorge

Their blazing magazines; and take, by storm,162

This poor terrestrial citadel of man.

Amazing period! when each mountain-height

Outburns Vesuvius; rocks eternal pour

Their melted mass, as rivers once they pour’d;

Stars rush; and final Ruin fiercely drives

Her ploughshare o’er creation!—while aloft,

More than astonishment! if more can be!

Far other firmament than e’er was seen,170

Than e’er was thought by man! far other stars!

Stars animate, that govern these of fire;

Far other sun!—A sun, O how unlike

The Babe at Bethlehem! how unlike the Man,

That groan’d on Calvary!—Yet He it is;

That Man of Sorrows! O how changed! what pomp!

In grandeur terrible, all heaven descends!

And gods, ambitious, triumph in his train.

A swift archangel, with his golden wing,

As blots and clouds, that darken and disgrace180

The scene divine, sweeps stars and suns aside.

And now, all dross removed, heaven’s own pure day,

Full on the confines of our ether, flames:

While (dreadful contrast!) far, how far beneath!

Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,

And storms sulphureous; her voracious jaws

Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey.

Lorenzo! welcome to this scene; the last

In nature’s course; the first in wisdom’s thought.189

This strikes, if aught can strike thee; this awakes

The most supine; this snatches man from death.

Rouse, rouse, Lorenzo, then, and follow me,

Where truth, the most momentous man can hear,

Loud calls my soul, and ardour wings her flight.

I find my inspiration in my theme:

The grandeur of my subject is my Muse.

At midnight, when mankind is wrapt in peace,

And worldly fancy feeds on golden dreams;

To give more dread to man’s most dreadful hour.

At midnight, ’tis presumed, this pomp will burst200

From tenfold darkness; sudden as the spark

From smitten steel; from nitrous grain, the blaze.

Man, starting from his couch, shall sleep no more!

The day is broke, which never more shall close!

Above, around, beneath, amazement all!

Terror and glory join’d in their extremes!

Our God in grandeur, and our world on fire!

All nature struggling in the pangs of death!

Dost thou not hear her? Dost thou not deplore

Her strong convulsions, and her final groan?210

Where are we now? Ah me! the ground is gone,

On which we stood; Lorenzo! while thou may’st,

Provide more firm support, or sink for ever!

Where? how? from whence? Vain hope! it is too late!

Where, where, for shelter, shall the guilty fly,

When consternation turns the good man pale?

Great day! for which all other days were made;

For which earth rose from chaos, man from earth;

And an eternity, the date of gods,

Descended on poor earth-created man!220

Great day of dread, decision, and despair!

At thought of thee, each sublunary wish

Lets go its eager grasp, and drops the world;223

And catches at each reed of hope in heaven.

At thought of thee!—And art thou absent then?

Lorenzo! no; ’tis here; it is begun;—

Already is begun the grand assize,

In thee, in all: deputed Conscience scales

The dread tribunal, and forestalls our doom;

Forestalls; and, by forestalling, proves it sure.230

Why on himself should man void judgment pass?

Is idle Nature laughing at her sons?

Who Conscience sent, her sentence will support,

And God above assert that God in man.

Thrice happy they that enter now the court

Heaven opens in their bosoms! but, how rare,

Ah me! that magnanimity, how rare!

What hero, like the man who stands himself;

Who dares to meet his naked heart alone;

Who bears, intrepid, the full charge it brings,240

Resolved to silence future murmurs there?

The coward flies; and, flying, is undone.

(Art thou a coward? No.) The coward flies;

Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know;

Asks, “What is truth?” with Pilate; and retires;

Dissolves the court, and mingles with the throng;

Asylum sad! from reason, hope, and heaven!

Shall all, but man look out with ardent eye,

For that great day, which was ordain’d for man?

O day of consummation! mark supreme250

(If men are wise) of human thought! nor least,

Or in the sight of angels, or their King!

Angels, whose radiant circles, height o’er height,

Order o’er order, rising, blaze o’er blaze,

As in a theatre, surround this scene,

Intent on man, and anxious for his fate.

Angels look out for thee; for thee, their Lord,257

To vindicate his glory; and for thee,

Creation universal calls aloud,

To disinvolve the moral world, and give

To Nature’s renovation brighter charms.

Shall man alone, whose fate, whose final fate

Hangs on that hour, exclude it from his thought?

I think of nothing else; I see! I feel it!

All nature, like an earthquake, trembling round!

All deities, like summer’s swarms, on wing!

All basking in the full meridian blaze!

I see the Judge enthroned! the flaming guard!

The volume open’d! open’d every heart!

A sunbeam pointing out each secret thought!270

No patron! intercessor none! now past

The sweet, the clement, mediatorial hour!

For guilt no plea! to pain, no pause! no bound!

Inexorable, all! and all, extreme!

Nor man alone; the Foe of God and man,

From his dark den, blaspheming, drags his chain,

And rears his brazen front, with thunder scarr’d:

Receives his sentence, and begins his hell.

All vengeance past, now, seems abundant grace:

Like meteors in a stormy sky, how roll280

His baleful eyes! he curses whom he dreads;

And deems it the first moment of his fall.

’Tis present to my thought!—and yet where is it?

Angels can’t tell me; angels cannot guess

The period; from created beings lock’d

In darkness. But the process, and the place,

Are less obscure; for these may man inquire.

Say, thou great close of human hopes and fears!

Great key of hearts! great finisher of fates!

Great end! and great beginning! say, Where art thou?

Art thou in time, or in eternity?291

Nor in eternity, nor time, I find thee.

These, as two monarchs, on their borders meet,

(Monarchs of all elapsed, or unarrived!)

As in debate, how best their powers allied,

May swell the grandeur, or discharge the wrath,

Of Him, whom both their monarchies obey.

Time, this vast fabric for him built (and doom’d

With him to fall), now bursting o’er his head;

His lamp, the sun, extinguish’d; from beneath300

The frown of hideous darkness, calls his sons

From their long slumber; from earth’s heaving womb,

To second birth! contemporary throng!

Roused at one call, upstarted from one bed,

Press’d in one crowd, appall’d with one amaze,

He turns them o’er, Eternity! to thee.

Then (as a king deposed disdains to live)

He falls on his own scythe; nor falls alone:

His greatest foe falls with him; Time, and he

Who murder’d all Time’s offspring, Death, expire.310

Time was! Eternity now reigns alone:

Awful eternity! offended queen!

And her resentment to mankind, how just!

With kind intent, soliciting access,

How often has she knock’d at human hearts!

Rich to repay their hospitality;

How often call’d! and with the voice of God!

Yet bore repulse, excluded as a cheat!

A dream! while foulest foes found welcome there!

A dream, a cheat, now, all things, but her smile.320

For, lo! her twice ten thousand gates thrown wide,

As thrice from Indus to the frozen pole,

With banners streaming as the comet’s blaze,

And clarions, louder than the deep in storms,

Sonorous as immortal breath can blow,325

Pour forth their myriads, potentates, and powers,

Of light, of darkness; in a middle field,

Wide, as creation! populous, as wide!

A neutral region! there to mark th’ event

Of that great drama, whose preceding scenes

Detain’d them close spectators, through a length

Of ages, ripening to this grand result;332

Ages, as yet unnumber’d, but by God;

Who now, pronouncing sentence, vindicates

The rights of Virtue, and his own renown.

Eternity, the various sentence past,

Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes,

Sulphureous, or ambrosial. What ensues?

The deed predominant! the deed of deeds!

Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven.340

The goddess, with determined aspect, turns

Her adamantine key’s enormous size

Through destiny’s inextricable wards,

Deep driving every bolt, on both their fates.

Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,

Down, down, she hurls it through the dark profound,

Ten thousand thousand fathom; there to rust,

And ne’er unlock her resolution more.

The deep resounds; and hell, through all her glooms,

Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.350

O how unlike the chorus of the skies!

O how unlike those shouts of joy, that shake

The whole ethereal! how the concave rings!

Nor strange! when deities their voice exalt;

And louder far, than when creation rose,

To see creation’s godlike aim, and end,

So well accomplish’d! so divinely closed!

To see the mighty dramatist’s last act,

(As meet), in glory rising o’er the rest.359

No fancied god, a God indeed, descends,

To solve all knots; to strike the moral home;

To throw full day on darkest scenes of time;

To clear, commend, exalt, and crown the whole.

Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise,

The charm’d spectators thunder their applause;

And the vast void beyond, applause resounds.

What then am I?—

Amidst applauding worlds,

And worlds celestial, is there found on earth,

A peevish, dissonant, rebellious string,370

Which jars in the grand chorus, and complains?

Censure on thee, Lorenzo! I suspend,

And turn it on myself; how greatly due!

All, all is right; by God ordain’d or done;

And who, but God, resumed the friends He gave?

And have I been complaining, then, so long?

Complaining of his favours; pain, and death?

Who, without Pain’s advice, would e’er be good?

Who, without Death, but would be good in vain?

Pain is to save from pain; all punishment,380

To make for peace; and death, to save from Death;

And second death, to guard immortal life;

To rouse the careless, the presumptuous awe,

And turn the tide of souls another way;

By the same tenderness divine ordain’d,

That planted Eden, and high bloom’d for man,

A fairer Eden, endless, in the skies.

Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene;

Resumes them, to prepare us for the next.

All evils natural are moral goods;390

All discipline, indulgence, on the whole.

None are unhappy: all have cause to smile,

But such as to themselves that cause deny.393

Our faults are at the bottom of our pains;

Error, in act, or judgment, is the source

Of endless sighs: we sin, or we mistake;

And Nature tax, when false opinion stings.

Let impious grief be banish’d, joy indulged;

But chiefly then, when Grief puts in her claim.

Joy from the joyous, frequently betrays,400

Oft lives in vanity, and dies in woe.

Joy, amidst ills, corroborates, exalts;

’Tis joy and conquest; joy, and virtue too.

A noble fortitude in ills, delights

Heaven, earth, ourselves; ’tis duty, glory, peace.

Affliction is the good man’s shining scene;

Prosperity conceals his brightest ray;

As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.

Heroes in battle, pilots in the storm,

And virtue in calamities, admire.410

The crown of manhood is a winter-joy;

An evergreen, that stands the northern blast,

And blossoms in the rigour of our fate.

’Tis a prime part of happiness, to know

How much unhappiness must prove our lot;

A part which few possess! I’ll pay life’s tax,

Without one rebel murmur, from this hour,

Nor think it misery to be a man;

Who thinks it is, shall never be a god.

Some ills we wish for, when we wish to live.420

What spoke proud Passion?—“Wish my being lost?”[53]

Presumptuous! blasphemous! absurd! and false!

The triumph of my soul is,—that I am;

And therefore that I may be—what? Lorenzo!

Look inward, and look deep; and deeper still;

Unfathomably deep our treasure runs426

In golden veins, through all eternity!

Ages, and ages, and succeeding still

New ages, where the phantom of an hour,

Which courts each night, dull slumber, for repair,

Shall wake, and wonder, and exult, and praise,

And fly through infinite, and all unlock;

And (if deserved) by Heaven’s redundant love,433

Made half adorable itself, adore;

And find, in adoration, endless joy!

Where thou, not master of a moment here,

Frail as the flower, and fleeting as the gale,

May’st boast a whole eternity, enrich’d

With all a kind Omnipotence can pour.

Since Adam fell, no mortal, uninspired,440

Has ever yet conceived, or ever shall,

How kind is God, how great (if good) is Man.

No man too largely from Heaven’s love can hope,

If what is hoped he labours to secure.

Ills?—there are none: All-gracious! none from thee;

From man full many! numerous is the race

Of blackest ills, and those immortal too,

Begot by Madness, on fair Liberty;

Heaven’s daughter, hell-debauch’d! her hand alone

Unlocks destruction to the sons of men,450

First barr’d by thine: high-wall’d with adamant,

Guarded with terrors reaching to this world,

And cover’d with the thunders of thy law;

Whose threats are mercies, whose injunctions, guides,

Assisting, not restraining, Reason’s choice;

Whose sanctions, unavoidable results

From nature’s course, indulgently reveal’d;

If unreveal’d, more dangerous, nor less sure.

Thus, an indulgent father warns his sons,

“Do this; fly that”—nor always tells the cause;460

Pleased to reward, as duty to his will,

A conduct needful to their own repose.

Great God of wonders! (if, thy love survey’d,

Aught else the name of wonderful retains),

What rocks are these, on which to build our trust!

Thy ways admit no blemish; none I find;

Or this alone—“That none is to be found.”

Not one, to soften Censure’s hardy crime;

Not one, to palliate peevish Grief’s Complaint,

Who, like a demon, murmuring from the dust,470

Dares into judgment call her Judge.—Supreme!

For all I bless thee; most, for the severe;

Her[54]death—my own at hand—the fiery gulf,

That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent!

It thunders;—but it thunders to preserve;

It strengthens what it strikes; its wholesome dread

Averts the dreaded pain; its hideous groans

Join heaven’s sweet hallelujahs in thy praise,

Great Source of good alone! how kind in all!

In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save.480

Thus, in thy world material, Mighty Mind!

Not that alone which solaces, and shines,

The rough and gloomy, challenges our praise.

The winter is as needful as the spring;

The thunder, as the sun; a stagnate mass

Of vapours breeds a pestilential air:

Nor more propitious the Favonian[55]breeze

To nature’s health, than purifying storms;

The dread volcano ministers to good.

Its smother’d flames might undermine the world.490

Loud Etnas fulminate in love to man;

Comets good omens are, when duly scann’d;492

And, in their use, eclipses learn to shine.

Man is responsible for ills received;

Those we call wretched are a chosen band,

Compell’d to refuge in the right, for peace.

Amid my list of blessings infinite,

Stands this the foremost, “That my heart has bled.”

’Tis Heaven’s last effort of good-will to man;

When Pain can’t bless, Heaven quits us in despair.500

Who fails to grieve, when just occasion calls,

Or grieves too much, deserves not to be blest;

Inhuman, or effeminate, his heart;

Reason absolves the grief, which reason ends.

May Heaven ne’er trust my friend with happiness,

Till it has taught him how to bear it well,

By previous pain; and made it safe to smile!

Such smiles are mine, and such may they remain;

Nor hazard their extinction, from excess.

My change of heart a change of style demands;510

The Consolation cancels the Complaint,

And makes a convert of my guilty song.

As when o’er-labour’d, and inclined to breathe,

A panting traveller, some rising ground,

Some small ascent, has gain’d, he turns him round,

And measures with his eye the various vales,

The fields, woods, meads, and rivers, he has pass’d;

And, satiate of his journey, thinks of home,

Endear’d by distance, nor affects more toil;

Thus I, though small, indeed, is that ascent520

The Muse has gain’d, review the paths she trod;

Various, extensive, beaten but by view;

And, conscious of her prudence in repose,

Pause; and with pleasure meditate an end,

Though still remote; so fruitful is my theme.

Through many a field of moral, and divine,526

The Muse has stray’d; and much of sorrow seen

In human ways; and much of false and vain;

Which none, who travel this bad road, can miss.

O’er friends deceased full heartily she wept;

Of love divine the wonders she display’d;

Proved man immortal; show’d the source of joy

The grand tribunal raised; assign’d the bounds

Of human grief: in few, to close the whole,

The moral Muse has shadow’d out a sketch,

Though not in form, nor with a Raphael-stroke,

Of most our weakness needs believe, or do,

In this our land of travel, and of hope,

For peace on earth, or prospect of the skies.539

What then remains? much! much! a mighty debt

To be discharged: these thoughts, O Night! are thine;

From thee they came, like lovers’ secret sighs,

While others slept. So, Cynthia (poets feign),

In shadows veil’d, soft-sliding from her sphere,

Her shepherd cheer’d; of her enamour’d less,

Than I of thee.—And art thou still unsung,

Beneath whose brow, and by whose aid, I sing?

Immortal silence! where shall I begin?

Where end? or how steal music from the spheres,

To soothe their goddess?550

O majestic Night!

Nature’s great ancestor! Day’s elder-born!

And fated to survive the transient sun!

By mortals, and immortals, seen with awe!

A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,

An azure zone thy waist; clouds, in heaven’s loom

Wrought through varieties of shape and shade,

In ample folds of drapery divine,

Thy flowing mantle form; and, heaven throughout,

Voluminously pour thy pompous train.560

Thy gloomy grandeurs (nature’s most august,

Inspiring aspect!) claim a grateful verse;

And, like a sable curtain starr’d with gold,

Drawn o’er my labours past, shall close the scene.

And what, O man! so worthy to be sung?

What more prepares us for the songs of heaven?

Creation, of archangels is the theme!

What, to be sung, so needful? What so well

Celestial joys prepare us to sustain?

The soul of man, His face design’d to see,570

Who gave these wonders to be seen by man,

Has here a previous scene of objects great,

On which to dwell; to stretch to that expanse

Of thought, to rise to that exalted height

Of admiration, to contract that awe,

And give her whole capacities that strength,

Which best may qualify for final joy.

The more our spirits are enlarged on earth,

The deeper draught shall they receive of heaven.

Heaven’s King! whose face unveil’d consummates bliss;

Redundant bliss! which fills that mighty void,581

The whole creation leaves in human hearts!

Thou, who didst touch the lip of Jesse’s son,

Rapt in sweet contemplation of these fires,

And set his harp in concert with the spheres;

While of thy works material the supreme

I dare attempt, assist my daring song.

Loose me from earth’s enclosure, from the sun’s

Contracted circle set my heart at large;

Eliminate my spirit, give it range590

Through provinces of thought yet unexplored;

Teach me, by this stupendous scaffolding,

Creation’s golden steps, to climb to Thee.

Teach me with Art great Nature to control,594

And spread a lustre o’er the shades of Night.

Feel I thy kind assent? and shall the sun

Be seen at midnight, rising in my song?

Lorenzo! come, and warm thee: thou, whose heart,

Whose little heart, is moor’d within a nook

Of this obscure terrestrial, anchor weigh.

Another ocean calls, a nobler port;

I am thy pilot, I thy prosperous gale.602

Gainful thy voyage through yon azure main;

Main, without tempest, pirate, rock, or shore;

And whence thou may’st import eternal wealth;

And leave to beggar’d minds the pearl and gold.

Thy travels dost thou boast o’er foreign realms?

Thou stranger to the world! thy tour begin;

Thy tour through Nature’s universal orb.

Nature delineates her whole chart at large,610

On soaring souls, that sail among the spheres;

And man how purblind, if unknown the whole!

Who circles spacious earth, then travels here,

Shall own, he never was from home before!

Come, my Prometheus,[56]from thy pointed rock

Of false ambition; if unchain’d, we’ll mount;

We’ll, innocently, steal celestial fire,

And kindle our devotion at the stars;

A theft, that shall not chain, but set thee free.

Above our atmosphere’s intestine[57]wars,620

Rain’s fountain-head, the magazine of hail;

Above the northern nests of feather’d snows,

The brew of thunders, and the flaming forge

That forms the crooked lightning; ’bove the caves

Where infant tempests wait their growing wings,

And tune their tender voices to that roar,

Which soon, perhaps, shall shake a guilty world;627

Above misconstrued omens of the sky,

Far-travell’d comets’ calculated blaze;

Elance[58]thy thought, and think of more than man.

Thy soul, till now, contracted, wither’d, shrunk,

Blighted by blasts of earth’s unwholesome air,

Will blossom here; spread all her faculties

To these bright ardours; every power unfold,

And rise into sublimities of thought.

Stars teach, as well as shine. At Nature’s birth,

Thus their commission ran—“Be kind to Man.”

Where art thou, poor benighted traveller?

The stars will light thee, though the moon should fail.

Where art thou, more benighted! more astray!640

In ways immoral? The stars call thee back;

And, if obey’d their counsel, set thee right.

This prospect vast, what is it?—Weigh’d aright,

’Tis Nature’s system of divinity,

And every student of the Night inspires.

’Tis elder Scripture, writ by God’s own hand:

Scripture authentic! uncorrupt by man.

Lorenzo! with my radius (the rich gift

Of thought nocturnal!) I’ll point out to thee

Its various lessons; some that may surprise650

An un-adept in mysteries of Night;

Little, perhaps, expected in her school,

Nor thought to grow on planet, or on star.

Bulls, lions, scorpions, monsters here we feign;

Ourselves more monstrous, not to see what here

Exists indeed;—a lecture to mankind.

What read we here?—Th’ existence of a God?

Yes; and of other beings, man above;

Natives of ether! sons of higher climes!

And, what may move Lorenzo’s wonder more,660

Eternity is written in the skies.661

And whose eternity?—Lorenzo! thine

Mankind’s eternity. Nor Faith alone,

Virtue grows here; here springs the sovereign cure

Of almost every vice; but chiefly thine;

Wrath, Pride, Ambition, and impure Desire.

Lorenzo! thou canst wake at midnight too,

Though not on morals bent: Ambition, Pleasure!

Those tyrants I for thee so lately fought,[59]

Afford their harass’d slaves but slender rest.670

Thou, to whom midnight is immoral noon,

And the sun’s noontide blaze, prime dawn of day;

Not by thy climate, but capricious crime,

Commencing one of our antipodes!

In thy nocturnal rove, one moment halt,

’Twixt stage and stage, of riot, and cabal;

And lift thine eye (if bold an eye to lift,

If bold to meet the face of injured Heaven)

To yonder stars: for other ends they shine,

Than to light revellers from shame to shame,680

And, thus, be made accomplices in guilt.

Why from yon arch, that infinite of space,

With infinite of lucid orbs replete,

Which set the living firmament on fire,

At the first glance, in such an overwhelm

Of wonderful, on man’s astonish’d sight,

Rushes Omnipotence—To curb our pride;

Our reason rouse, and lead it to that Power,

Whose love lets down these silver chains of light;

To draw up man’s ambition to Himself,690

And bind our chaste affections to His throne.

Thus the three virtues, least alive on earth,

And welcomed on heaven’s coast with most applause,

An humble, pure, and heavenly-minded heart,694

Are here inspired:—and canst thou gaze too long?

Nor stands thy wrath deprived of its reproof,

Or un-upbraided by this radiant choir.

The planets of each system represent

Kind neighbours; mutual amity prevails;

Sweet interchange of rays, received, return’d;

Enlightening, and enlighten’d! all, at once,

Attracting, and attracted! Patriot like,702

None sins against the welfare of the whole;

But their reciprocal, unselfish aid,

Affords an emblem of millennial love.

Nothing in nature, much less conscious being,

Was e’er created solely for itself:

Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this

Material picture of benevolence.

And know, of all our supercilious race,710

Thou most inflammable! thou wasp of men!

Man’s angry heart, inspected, would be found

As rightly set, as are the starry spheres;

’Tis Nature’s structure, broke by stubborn will,

Breeds all that uncelestial discord there.

Wilt thou not feel the bias Nature gave?

Canst thou descend from converse with the skies,

And seize thy brother’s throat?—For what—a clod,

An inch of earth? The planets cry, “Forbear!”

They chase our double darkness; Nature’s gloom,720

And (kinder still!) our intellectual night.

And see, Day’s amiable sister sends

Her invitation, in the softest rays

Of mitigated lustre; courts thy sight,

Which suffers from her tyrant brother’s blaze.

Night grants thee the full freedom of the skies,

Nor rudely reprimands thy lifted eye;

With gain, and joy, she bribes thee to be wise.728

Night opes the noblest scenes, and sheds an awe,

Which gives those venerable scenes full weight,

And deep reception, in th’ intender’d heart;

While light peeps through the darkness, like a spy;

And darkness shows its grandeur by the light.

Nor is the profit greater than the joy,

If human hearts at glorious objects glow,

And admiration can inspire delight.

What speak I more, than I, this moment, feel?

With pleasing stupor first the soul is struck

(Stupor ordain’d to make her truly wise!):

Then into transport starting from her trance,740

With love, and admiration, how she glows!

This gorgeous apparatus! this display!

This ostentation of creative power!

This theatre!—what eye can take it in?

By what divine enchantment was it raised,

For minds of the first magnitude to launch

In endless speculation, and adore?

One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine;

And light us deep into the Deity;

How boundless in magnificence and might!750

O what a confluence of ethereal fires,

Form urns unnumber’d, down the steep of heaven,

Streams to a point, and centres in my sight!

Nor tarries there; I feel it at my heart.

My heart, at once, it humbles, and exalts;

Lays it in dust, and calls it to the skies.

Who sees it unexalted? or unawed?

Who sees it, and can stop at what is seen?

Material offspring of Omnipotence!

Inanimate, all-animating birth!760

Work worthy Him who made it! worthy praise!

All praise! praise more than human! nor denied762

Thy praise divine!—But though man, drown’d in sleep,

Withholds his homage, not alone I wake;

Bright legions swarm unseen, and sing, unheard

By mortal ear, the glorious Architect,

In this His universal temple hung

With lustres, with innumerable lights,

That shed religion on the soul; at once,

The temple, and the preacher! O how loud770

It calls devotion! genuine growth of Night!

Devotion! daughter of Astronomy!

An undevout astronomer is mad.

True; all things speak a God; but in the small,

Men trace out Him; in great, He seizes man;

Seizes, and elevates, and wraps, and fills

With new inquiries, ’mid associates new.

Tell me, ye stars! ye planets! tell me, all

Ye starr’d, and planeted, inhabitants! what is it?

What are these sons of wonder? say, proud arch780

(Within those azure palaces they dwell),

Built with divine ambition! in disdain

Of limit built! built in the taste of heaven!

Vast concave! ample dome! wast thou design’d

A meet apartment for the Deity?—

Not so; that thought alone thy state impairs,

Thy lofty sinks, and shallows thy profound,

And straitens thy diffusive; dwarfs the whole,

And makes a universe an orrery[60].

But when I drop mine eye, and look on man,790

Thy right regain’d, thy grandeur is restored,

O Nature! wide flies off th’ expanding round.

As when whole magazines, at once, are fired,

The smitten air is hollow’d by the blow;

The vast displosion dissipates the clouds;

Shock’d ether’s billows dash the distant skies;796

Thus (but far more) th’ expanding round flies off,

And leaves a mighty void, a spacious womb,

Might teem with new creation; reinflamed

Thy luminaries triumph, and assume

Divinity themselves. Nor was it strange,

Matter high-wrought to such surprising pomp,

Such godlike glory, stole the style of gods,803

From ages dark, obtuse, and steep’d in sense;

For, sure, to sense, they truly are divine,

And half absolved idolatry from guilt;

Nay, turn’d it into virtue. Such it was

In those, who put forth all they had of man

Unlost, to lift their thought, nor mounted higher;

But, weak of wing, on planets perch’d; and thought810

What was their highest, must be their adored.

But they how weak, who could no higher mount?

And are there, then, Lorenzo! those, to whom

Unseen, and unexistent, are the same?

And if incomprehensible is join’d,

Who dare pronounce it madness, to believe?

Why has the mighty Builder thrown aside

All measure in His work; stretch’d out His line

So far, and spread amazement o’er the whole?

Then (as he took delight in wide extremes),820

Deep in the bosom of His universe,

Dropp’d down that reasoning mite, that insect, Man,

To crawl, and gaze, and wonder at the scene?—

That man might ne’er presume to plead amazement

For disbelief of wonders in himself.

Shall God be less miraculous, than what

His hand has form’d? Shall mysteries descend

From unmysterious? things more elevate,

Be more familiar? uncreated lie

More obvious than created, to the grasp830

Of human thought? The more of wonderful

Is heard in Him, the more we should assent.

Could we conceive Him, God He could not be;

Or He not God, or we could not be men.

A God alone can comprehend a God;

Man’s distance how immense! On such a theme,

Know this, Lorenzo! (seem it ne’er so strange)

Nothing can satisfy, but what confounds;

Nothing, but what astonishes, is true.

The scene thou seest, attests the truth I sing,840

And every star sheds light upon thy creed.

These stars, this furniture, this cost of heaven,

If but reported, thou hadst ne’er believed;

But thine eye tells thee, the romance is true.

The grand of nature is th’ Almighty’s oath,

In Reason’s court, to silence Unbelief.

How my mind, opening at this scene, imbibes

The moral emanations of the skies,

While nought, perhaps, Lorenzo less admires!

Has the Great Sovereign sent ten thousand worlds850

To tells us, He resides above them all,

In glory’s unapproachable recess?

And dare earth’s bold inhabitants deny

The sumptuous, the magnific embassy

A moment’s audience? Turn we, nor will hear

From whom they come, or what they would impart

For man’s emolument; sole cause that stoops

Their grandeur to man’s eye? Lorenzo! rouse;

Let thought, awaken’d, take the lightning’s wing,

And glance from east to west, from pole to pole.860

Who sees, but is confounded, or convinced?

Renounces reason, or a God adores?

Mankind was sent into the world to see:

Sight gives the science needful to their peace;864

That obvious science asks small learning’s aid.

Would’st thou on metaphysic pinions soar?

Or wound thy patience amid logic thorns?

Or travel history’s enormous round?

Nature no such hard task enjoins: she gave

A make to man directive of his thought;

A make set upright, pointing to the stars,

As who shall say, “Read thy chief lesson there.”872

Too late to read this manuscript of heaven,

When, like a parchment scroll, shrunk up by flames,

It folds Lorenzo’s lesson from his sight.

Lesson how various! Not the God alone,

I see His ministers; I see, diffused

In radiant orders, essences sublime,

Of various offices, of various plume,

In heavenly liveries, distinctly clad,880

Azure, green, purple, pearl, or downy gold,

Or all commix’d; they stand, with wings outspread,

Listening to catch the Master’s least command,

And fly through nature, ere the moment ends;

Numbers innumerable!—well conceived

By Pagan, and by Christian! O’er each sphere

Presides an angel, to direct its course,

And feed, or fan, its flames; or to discharge

Other high trusts unknown. For who can see

Such pomp of matter, and imagine, Mind,890

For which alone Inanimate was made,

More sparingly dispensed? that nobler son,

Far liker the great Sire!—’Tis thus the skies

Inform us of superiors numberless,

As much, in excellence, above mankind,

As above earth, in magnitude, the spheres.

These, as a cloud of witnesses, hang o’er us;

In a throng’d theatre are all our deeds;898

Perhaps, a thousand demigods descend

On every beam we see, to walk with men.

Awful reflection! Strong restraint from ill!

Yet, here, our virtue finds still stronger aid

From these ethereal glories sense surveys.

Something, like magic, strikes from this blue vault;

With just attention is it view’d? We feel

A sudden succour, unimplored, unthought;

Nature herself does half the work of Man.

Seas, rivers, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks,

The promontory’s height, the depth profound

Of subterranean, excavated grots[61],910

Black brow’d, and vaulted high, and yawning wide

From Nature’s structure, or the scoop of Time;

If ample of dimension, vast of size,

Even these an aggrandizing impulse give;

Of solemn thought enthusiastic heights

Even these infuse.—But what of vast in these?

Nothing;—or we must own the skies forgot.

Much less in art.—Vain art! Thou pigmy power!

How dost thou swell and strut, with human pride,

To show thy littleness! What childish toys,920

Thy watery columns squirted to the clouds!

Thy basin’d rivers, and imprison’d seas!

Thy mountains moulded into forms of men!

Thy hundred-gated capitals! or those

Where three days’ travel left us much to ride;

Gazing on miracles by mortals wrought,

Arches triumphal, theatres immense,

Or nodding gardens pendent in mid-air!

Or temples proud to meet their gods half-way!

Yet these affect us in no common kind.930

What then the force of such superior scenes?

Enter a temple, it will strike an awe:932

What awe from this the Deity has built!

A good man seen, though silent, counsel gives:

The touch’d spectator wishes to be wise:

In a bright mirror His own hands have made,

Here we see something like the face of God.

Seems it not then enough, to say, Lorenzo!

To man abandon’d, “Hast thou seen the skies?”

And yet, so thwarted Nature’s kind design940

By daring man, he makes her sacred awe

(That guard from ill) his shelter, his temptation

To more than common guilt, and quite inverts

Celestial art’s intent. The trembling stars

See crimes gigantic, stalking through the gloom

With front erect, that hide their head by day,

And making night still darker by their deeds.

Slumbering in covert, till the shades descend,

Rapine and Murder, link’d, now prowl for prey.

The miser earths his treasure; and the thief,950

Watching the mole, half beggars him ere morn.

Now plots, and foul conspiracies, awake;

And, muffling up their horrors from the moon,

Havoc and devastation they prepare,

And kingdoms tottering in the field of blood.

Now sons of riot in mid-revel rage.

What shall I do?—suppress it? or proclaim?—

Why sleeps the thunder? Now, Lorenzo! now,

His best friend’s couch the rank adulterer

Ascends secure; and laughs at gods and men.960

Preposterous madmen, void of fear or shame,

Lay their crimes bare to these chaste eyes of Heaven;

Yet shrink, and shudder, at a mortal’s sight.

Were moon, and stars, for villains only made?

To guide, yet screen them, with tenebrious[62]light?

No; they were made to fashion the sublime966

Of human hearts, and wiser make the wise.

Those ends were answer’d once; when mortals lived

Of stronger wing, of aquiline ascent

In theory sublime. O how unlike

Those vermin of the night, this moment sung,

Who crawl on earth, and on her venom feed!972

Those ancient sages, human stars! They met

Their brothers of the skies, at midnight hour;

Their counsel ask’d; and, what they ask’d, obey’d.

The Stagirite, and Plato, he who drank[63]

The poison’d bowl, and he of Tusculum,[64]

With him of Corduba,[65](immortal names!)

In these unbounded, and Elysian, walks,

An area fit for gods, and godlike men,980

They took their nightly round, through radiant paths

By seraphs trod; instructed, chiefly, thus,

To tread in their bright footsteps here below;

To walk in worth still brighter than the skies.

There they contracted their contempt of earth;

Of hopes eternal kindled, there, the fire;

There, as in near approach, they glow’d, and grew

(Great visitants!) more intimate with God,

More worth to men, more joyous to themselves.

Through various virtues, they, with ardour, ran990

The zodiac of their learn’d, illustrious lives.

In Christian hearts, O for a Pagan zeal!

A needful, but opprobrious prayer! As much

Our ardour less, as greater is our light.

How monstrous this in morals! Scarce more strange

Would this phenomenon in nature strike,

A sun, that froze her, or a star, that warm’d.

What taught these heroes of the moral world?998

To these thou givest thy praise, give credit too.

These doctors ne’er were pension’d to deceive thee;

And Pagan tutors are thy taste.—They taught,

That, narrow views betray to misery:

That, wise it is to comprehend the whole:

That, virtue, rose from nature, ponder’d well,

The single base of virtue built to heaven:

That God, and nature, our attention claim:

That nature is the glass reflecting God,

As, by the sea, reflected is the sun,

Too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere:

That, mind immortal loves immortal aims:1010

That, boundless mind affects a boundless space:

That vast surveys, and the sublime of things,

The soul assimilate, and make her great:

That, therefore, heaven her glories, as a fund

Of inspiration, thus spreads out to man.

Such are their doctrines; such the Night inspired.

And what more true? what truth of greater weight?

The soul of man was made to walk the skies;

Delightful outlet of her prison here!

There, disencumber’d from her chains, the ties1020

Of toys terrestrial, she can rove at large;

There, freely can respire, dilate, extend,

In full proportion let loose all her powers;

And, undeluded, grasp at something great.

Nor, as a stranger, does she wander there;

But, wonderful herself, through wonder strays;

Contemplating their grandeur, finds her own;

Dives deep in their economy divine,

Sits high in judgment on their various laws,

And, like a master, judges not amiss.1030

Hence greatly pleased, and justly proud, the soul

Grows conscious of her birth celestial; breathes1032

More life, more vigour, in her native air;

And feels herself at home amongst the stars;

And, feeling, emulates her country’s praise.

What call we, then, the firmament, Lorenzo?—

As earth the body, since the skies sustain

The soul with food, that gives immortal life,

Call it, the noble pasture of the mind;

Which there expatiates, strengthens, and exults,1040

And riots through the luxuries of thought.

Call it, the garden of the Deity,

Blossom’d with stars, redundant in the growth

Of fruit ambrosial; moral fruit to man.

Call it, the breastplate of the true High Priest,

Ardent with gems oracular, that give,

In points of highest moment, right response;

And ill neglected, if we prize our peace.

Thus, have we found a true astrology;

Thus, have we found a new, and noble sense,1050

In which alone stars govern human fates.

O that the stars (as some have feign’d) let fall

Bloodshed, and havoc, on embattled realms,

And rescued monarchs from so black a guilt!

Bourbon! this wish how generous in a foe!

Would’st thou be great, would’st thou become a god,

And stick thy deathless name among the stars,

For mighty conquests on a needle’s point?

Instead of forging chains for foreigners,

Bastile thy tutor: grandeur all thy aim?1060

As yet thou know’st not what it is: how great,

How glorious, then, appears the mind of man,

When in it all the stars, and planets, roll!

And what it seems, it is: great objects make

Great minds, enlarging as their views enlarge;1065

Those still more godlike, as these more divine.

And more divine than these, thou canst not see.

Dazzled, o’erpower’d, with the delicious draught

Of miscellaneous splendours, how I reel

From thought to thought, inebriate, without end!

An Eden, this! a Paradise unlost!

I meet the Deity in every view,1072

And tremble at my nakedness before him!

O that I could but reach the tree of life!

For here it grows, unguarded from our taste;

No flaming sword denies our entrance here;

Would man but gather, he might live for ever.

Lorenzo! much of moral hast thou seen.

Of curious arts art thou more fond? Then mark

The mathematic glories of the skies,1080

In number, weight, and measure, all ordain’d.

Lorenzo’s boasted builders, Chance, and Fate,

Are left to finish his aërial towers;

Wisdom and choice, their well-known characters

Here deep impress; and claim it for their own.

Though splendid all, no splendour void of use;

Use rivals beauty; art contends with power;

No wanton waste, amid effuse expense;

The great Economist adjusting all

To prudent pomp, magnificently wise.1090

How rich the prospect! and for ever new!

And newest to the man that views it most;

For newer still in infinite succeeds.

Then, these aërial racers, O how swift!

How the shaft loiters from the strongest string!

Spirit alone can distance the career.

Orb above orb ascending without end!

Circle in circle, without end, enclosed!

Wheel, within wheel; Ezekiel! like to thine!1099

Like thine, it seems a vision or a dream;

Though seen, we labour to believe it true!

What involution! what extent! what swarms

Of worlds, that laugh at earth! immensely great!

Immensely distant from each other’s spheres!

What, then, the wondrous space through which they roll?

At once it quite engulfs all human thought;

’Tis comprehension’s absolute defeat.

Nor think thou seest a wild disorder here;

Through this illustrious chaos to the sight,

Arrangement neat, and chastest order, reign.1110

The path prescribed, inviolably kept,

Upbraids the lawless sallies of mankind.

Worlds, ever thwarting, never interfere;

What knots are tied! how soon are they dissolved,

And set the seeming married planets free!

They rove for ever, without error rove;

Confusion unconfused! nor less admire

This tumult untumultuous; all on wing!

In motion, all! yet what profound repose!

What fervid action, yet no noise! as awed1120

To silence, by the presence of their Lord;

Or hush’d by His command, in love to man,

And bid let fall soft beams on human rest,

Restless themselves. On yon cerulean plain,

In exultation to their God, and thine,

They dance, they sing eternal jubilee,

Eternal celebration of His praise.

But, since their song arrives not at our ear,

Their dance perplex’d exhibits to the sight

Fair hieroglyphic of His peerless power.1130

Mark how the labyrinthian turns they take,

The circles intricate, and mystic maze,

Weave the grand cipher of Omnipotence;1133

To gods, how great! how legible to man!

Leaves so much wonder greater wonder still?

Where are the pillars that support the skies?

What more than Atlantean shoulder props

Th’ incumbent load? What magic, what strange art,

In fluid air these ponderous orbs sustains?

Who would not think them hung in golden chains?—1140

And so they are; in the high will of heaven,

Which fixes all; makes adamant of air,

Or air of adamant; makes all of nought,

Or nought of all; if such the dread decree.

Imagine from their deep foundations torn

The most gigantic sons of earth, the broad

And towering Alps, all toss’d into the sea;

And, light as down, or volatile as air,

Their bulks enormous, dancing on the waves,

In time, and measure, exquisite; while all1150

The winds, in emulation of the spheres,

Tune their sonorous instruments aloft;

The concert swell, and animate the ball.

Would this appear amazing? What, then, worlds,

In a far thinner element sustain’d,

And acting the same part, with greater skill,

More rapid movement, and for noblest ends?

More obvious ends to pass, are not these stars

The seats majestic, proud imperial thrones,

On which angelic delegates of heaven,1160

At certain periods, as the Sovereign nods,

Discharge high trusts of vengeance, or of love;

To clothe, in outward grandeur, grand design,

And acts most solemn still more solemnize?

Ye citizens of air! what ardent thanks,

What full effusion of the grateful heart,

Is due from man indulged in such a sight!1167

A sight so noble! and a sight so kind!

It drops new truths at every new survey!

Feels not Lorenzo something stir within,

That sweeps away all period? As these spheres

Measure duration, they no less inspire

The godlike hope of ages without end.

The boundless space, through which these rovers take

Their restless roam, suggests the sister thought

Of boundless time. Thus, by kind Nature’s skill,

To man unlabour’d, that important guest,

Eternity, finds entrance at the sight:

And an eternity, for man ordain’d,

Or these his destined midnight counsellors,1180

The stars, had never whisper’d it to man.

Nature informs, but ne’er insults, her sons.

Could she then kindle the most ardent wish

To disappoint it?—That is blasphemy.

Thus, of thy creed a second article,

Momentous, as th’ existence of a God,

Is found (as I conceive) where rarely sought;

And thou may’st read thy soul immortal, here.

Here, then, Lorenzo! on these glories dwell;

Nor want the gilt, illuminated, roof,1190

That calls the wretched gay to dark delights.

Assemblies?—This is one divinely bright;

Here, unendanger’d in health, wealth, or fame,

Range through the fairest, and the Sultan scorn;

He, wise as thou, no crescent holds so fair,

As that, which on his turban awes a world;

And thinks the moon is proud to copy him.

Look on her, and gain more than worlds can give,

A mind superior to the charms of power.

Thou muffled in delusions of this life!1200

Can yonder moon turn ocean in his bed,1201

From side to side, in constant ebb, and flow,

And purify from stench his watery realms?

And fails her moral influence? wants she power

To turn Lorenzo’s stubborn tide of thought

From stagnating on earth’s infected shore,

And purge from nuisance his corrupted heart?

Fails her attraction when it draws to heaven?

Nay, and to what thou valuest more, earth’s joy?

Minds elevate, and panting for unseen,1210

And defecate[66]from sense, alone obtain

Full relish of existence undeflower’d,

The life of life, the zest of worldly bliss:

All else on earth amounts—to what? to this:

“Bad to be suffer’d; blessings to be left:”

Earth’s richest inventory boasts no more.

Of higher scenes be, then, the call obey’d.

O let me gaze!—Of gazing there’s no end.

O let me think!—Thought too is wilder’d here;

In midway flight imagination tires;1220

Yet soon reprunes her wing to soar anew,

Her point unable to forbear, or gain;

So great the pleasure, so profound the plan!

A banquet, this, where men, and angels, meet,

Eat the same manna, mingle earth and heaven.

How distant some of these nocturnal suns!

So distant (says the sage), ’twere not absurd

To doubt, if beams, set out at Nature’s birth,

Are yet arrived at this so foreign world;

Though nothing half so rapid as their flight.1230

An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,

And roll for ever: who can satiate sight

In such a scene? in such an ocean wide

Of deep astonishment? where depth, height, breadth,

Are lost in their extremes; and where to count1235

The thick-sown glories in this field of fire,

Perhaps a seraph’s computation fails.

Now, go, Ambition! boast thy boundless might

In conquest, o’er the tenth part of a grain.

And yet Lorenzo calls for miracles,

To give his tottering faith a solid base.

Why call for less than is already thine?1242

Thou art no novice in theology;

What is a miracle?—’Tis a reproach,

’Tis an implicit satire, on mankind;

And while it satisfies, it censures too.

To common sense, great Nature’s course proclaims

A Deity: when mankind falls asleep,

A miracle is sent, as an alarm;

To wake the world, and prove Him o’er again,1250

By recent argument, but not more strong.

Say, which imports more plenitude of power,

Or nature’s laws to fix, or to repeal?

To make a sun, or stop his mid career?

To countermand his orders, and send back

The flaming courier to the frighted east,

Warm’d, and astonish’d, at his evening ray?

Or bid the moon, as with her journey tired,

In Ajalon’s[67]soft, flowery vale repose?

Great things are these; still greater, to create.1260

From Adam’s bower look down through the whole train

Of miracles;—resistless is their power?

They do not, can not, more amaze the mind,

Than this, call’d unmiraculous survey,

If duly weigh’d, if rationally seen,

If seen with human eyes. The brute, indeed,

Sees nought but spangles here; the fool, no more.

Say’st thou, “The course of nature governs all?”

The course of Nature is the art of God.1269

The miracles thou call’st for, this attest;

For say, could Nature Nature’s course control?

But, miracles apart, who sees Him not,

Nature’s controller, author, guide, and end?

Who turns his eye on Nature’s midnight face,

But must inquire—“What hand behind the scene,

What arm almighty, put these wheeling globes

In motion, and wound up the vast machine?

Who rounded in his palm these spacious orbs?

Who bowl’d them flaming through the dark profound,

Numerous as glittering gems of morning dew,1280

Or sparks from populous cities in a blaze,

And set the bosom of old Night on fire?

Peopled her desert, and made horror smile?”

Or, if the military style delights thee

(For stars have fought their battles, leagued with man),

“Who marshals this bright host? enrols their names?

Appoints their posts, their marches, and returns,

Punctual, at stated periods? who disbands

These veteran troops, their final duty done,

If e’er disbanded?”—He, whose potent word,1290

Like the loud trumpet, levied first their powers

In Night’s inglorious empire, where they slept

In beds of darkness: arm’d them with fierce flames,

Arranged, and disciplined, and clothed in gold;

And call’d them out of chaos to the field,

Where now they war with vice and unbelief.

O let us join this army! joining these,

Will give us hearts intrepid, at that hour,

When brighter flames shall cut a darker night;

When these strong demonstrations of a God1300

Shall hide their heads, or tumble from their spheres,

And one eternal curtain cover all!

Struck at that thought, as new awaked, I lift1303

A more enlighten’d eye, and read the stars

To man still more propitious; and their aid

(Though guiltless of idolatry) implore;

Nor longer rob them of their noblest name.

O ye dividers of my time! ye bright

Accountants of my days, and months, and years,

In your fair calendar distinctly mark’d!1310

Since that authentic, radiant register,

Though man inspects it not, stands good against him;

Since you, and years, roll on, though man stands still;

Teach me my days to number, and apply

My trembling heart to wisdom; now beyond

All shadow of excuse for fooling on.

Age smooths our path to prudence; sweeps aside

The snares keen appetite and passion spread

To catch stray souls; and woe to that grey head,

Whose folly would undo, what age has done!1320

Aid then, aid, all ye stars!—Much rather, Thou,

Great Artist! Thou, whose finger set aright

This exquisite machine, with all its wheels,

Though intervolved, exact; and pointing out

Life’s rapid, and irrevocable flight,

With such an index fair, as none can miss,

Who lifts an eye, nor sleeps till it is closed.

Open mine eye, dread Deity! to read

The tacit doctrine of thy works; to see

Things as they are, unalter’d through the glass1330

Of worldly wishes. Time, eternity!

(’Tis these, mismeasured, ruin all mankind)

Set them before me; let me lay them both

In equal scale, and learn their various weight.

Let time appear a moment, as it is;

And let eternity’s full orb, at once,

Turn on my soul, and strike it into heaven.1337

When shall I see far more than charms me now?

Gaze on creation’s model in thy breast

Unveil’d, nor wonder at the transcript more?

When this vile, foreign, dust, which smothers all

That travel earth’s deep vale, shall I shake off?

When shall my soul her incarnation quit,

And, readopted to thy bless’d embrace,

Obtain her apotheosis in Thee?

Dost think, Lorenzo, this is wandering wide?

No,’tis directly striking at the mark;

To wake thy dead devotion was my point;

And how I bless Night’s consecrating shades,

Which to a temple turn an universe;1350

Fill us with great ideas, full of heaven,

And antidote the pestilential earth!

In every storm, that either frowns, or falls,

What an asylum has the soul in prayer!

And what a fane[68]is this, in which to pray!

And what a God must dwell in such a fane!

Oh, what a genius must inform the skies!

And is Lorenzo’s salamander heart

Cold, and untouch’d, amid these sacred fires?

O ye nocturnal sparks! ye glowing embers,1360

On heaven’s broad hearth! who burn, or burn no more,

Who blaze, or die, as Great Jehovah’s breath

Or blows you, or forbears; assist my song;

Pour your whole influence; exorcise his heart,

So long possess’d; and bring him back to man.

And is Lorenzo a demurrer still?

Pride in thy parts provokes thee to contest

Truths, which, contested, put thy parts to shame.

Nor shame they more Lorenzo’s head than heart,

A faithless heart, how despicably small!1370

Too strait, aught great or generous to receive!1371

Fill’d with an atom! fill’d, and foul’d, with self!

And self mistaken! self, that lasts an hour!

Instincts and passions, of the nobler kind,

Lie suffocated there; or they alone,

Reason apart, would wake high hope; and open,

To ravish’d thought, that intellectual sphere,

Where order, wisdom, goodness, providence,

Their endless miracles of love display,

And promise all the truly great desire.1380

The mind that would be happy, must be great;

Great, in its wishes; great, in its surveys.

Extended views a narrow mind extend;

Push out its corrugate, expansive make,

Which, ere long, more than planets shall embrace.

A man of compass makes a man of worth;

Divine contemplate, and become divine.

As man was made for glory, and for bliss,

All littleness is in approach to woe;

Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,1390

And let in manhood; let in happiness;

Admit the boundless theatre of thought

From nothing, up to God; which makes a man.

Take God from nature, nothing great is left;

Man’s mind is in a pit, and nothing sees;

Man’s heart is in a jakes[69], and loves the mire.

Emerge from thy profound; erect thine eye;

See thy distress! how close art thou besieged!

Besieged by Nature, the proud sceptic’s foe!

Enclosed by these innumerable worlds,1400

Sparkling conviction on the darkest mind,

As in a golden net of Providence.

How art thou caught, sure captive of belief!

From this thy bless’d captivity, what art,

What blasphemy to reason, sets thee free!1405

This scene is heaven’s indulgent violence:

Canst thou bear up against this tide of glory?

What is earth bosom’d in these ambient orbs,

But, faith in God imposed, and press’d on man?

Darest thou still litigate thy desperate cause,

Spite of these numerous, awful, witnesses,

And doubt the deposition of the skies?1412

O how laborious is thy way to ruin!

Laborious! ’tis impracticable quite;

To sink beyond a doubt, in this debate,

With all his weight of wisdom and of will,

And crime flagitious, I defy a fool.

Some wish they did; but no man disbelieves.

God is a spirit; spirit cannot strike

These gross, material organs; God by man1420

As much is seen, as man a God can see,

In these astonishing exploits of power.

What order, beauty, motion, distance, size!

Concertion of design, how exquisite!

How complicate, in their divine police!

Apt means! great ends! consent to general good!—

Each attribute of these material gods,

So long (and that with specious pleas) adored,

A separate conquest gains o’er rebel thought;

And leads in triumph the whole mind of man.1430

Lorenzo! this may seem harangue to thee;

Such all is apt to seem, that thwarts our will.

And dost thou, then, demand a simple proof

Of this great master moral of the skies,

Unskill’d, or disinclined, to read it there?

Since ’tis the basis, and all drops without it,

Take it, in one compact, unbroken chain.

Such proof insists on an attentive ear;

’Twill not make one amid a mob of thoughts,1439

And, for thy notice, struggle with the world.

Retire;—the world shut out;—thy thoughts call home;—

Imagination’s airy wing repress;—

Lock up thy senses;—let no passion stir;—

Wake all to Reason;—let her reign alone;—

Then, in thy soul’s deep silence, and the depth

Of Nature’s silence, midnight, thus inquire,

As I have done; and shall inquire no more.

In nature’s channel, thus the questions run:

“What am I? and from whence?—I nothing know,

But that I am; and, since I am, conclude1450

Something eternal: had there e’er been nought,

Nought still had been: eternal there must be.—

But what eternal?—Why not human race?

And Adam’s ancestors without an end?—

That’s hard to be conceived; since every link

Of that long-chain’d succession is so frail;

Can every part depend, and not the whole?

Yet grant it true; new difficulties rise;

I’m still quite out at sea; nor see the shore.

Whence earth, and these bright orbs?—eternal too?

Grant matter was eternal; still these orbs1461

Would want some other father;—much design

Is seen in all their motions, all their makes;

Design implies intelligence, and art;

That can’t be from themselves—or man; that art

Man scarce can comprehend, could man bestow?

And nothing greater yet allow’d than man.—

Who, motion, foreign to the smallest grain,

Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?

Who bid brute matter’s restive lump assume1470

Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?

Has matter innate motion? then each atom,

Asserting its indisputable right1473

To dance, would form an universe of dust:

Has matter none? Then whence these glorious forms

And boundless flights, from shapeless, and reposed?

Has matter more than motion? Has it thought,

Judgment, and genius? Is it deeply learn’d

In mathematics? Has it framed such laws,

Which but to guess, a Newton made immortal?—1480

If so, how each sage atom laughs at me,

Who think a clod inferior to a man!

If art, to form; and counsel, to conduct;

And that with greater far than human skill;

Resides not in each block;—a Godhead reigns.—

Grant, then, invisible, eternal, Mind;

That granted, all is solved.—But, granting that,

Draw I not o’er me a still darker cloud?

Grant I not that which I can ne’er conceive?

A being without origin, or end!—1490

Hail, human liberty! There is no God—

Yet, why? On either scheme that knot subsists;

Subsist it must, in God, or human race;

If in the last, how many knots beside,

Indissoluble all?—Why choose it there,

Where, chosen, still subsist ten thousand more?

Reject it, where, that chosen, all the rest

Dispersed, leave reason’s whole horizon clear?

This is not reason’s dictate; Reason says,

Close with the side where one grain turns the scale;—1500

What vast preponderance is here! can reason

With louder voice exclaim—Believe a God?

And reason heard, is the sole mark of man.

What things impossible must man think true,

On any other system! and how strange

To disbelieve, through mere credulity!”

If, in this chain, Lorenzo finds no flaw,1507

Let it for ever bind him to belief.

And where the link, in which a flaw he finds?

And, if a God there is, that God how great!

How great that Power, whose providential care

Through these bright orbs’ dark centres darts a ray!

Of nature universal threads the whole!

And hangs creation, like a precious gem,

Though little, on the footstool of his throne!

That little gem, how large! A weight let fall

From a fix’d star, in ages can it reach

This distant earth! Say, then, Lorenzo! where,

Where, ends this mighty building? where, begin

The suburbs of creation? where, the wall1520

Whose battlements look o’er into the vale

Of non-existence! Nothing’s strange abode!

Say, at what point of space Jehovah dropp’d

His slacken’d line, and laid his balance by;

Weigh’d worlds, and measured infinite, no more?

Where, rears His terminating pillar high

Its extra-mundane head? and says, to gods,

In characters illustrious as the sun,—

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