NARCISSA.

NARCISSA.TO HER GRACETHE DUCHESS OF P——.[10]Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.—Virg.NIGHT THIRD.NARCISSA.From dreams, where thought in fancy’s maze runs mad,To reason, that heaven-lighted lamp in man,Once more I wake; and at the destined hour,Punctual as lovers to the moment sworn,I keep my assignation with my woe.Oh! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought,Lost to the noble sallies of the soul!Who think it solitude to be alone.Communion sweet! communion large and high!Our reason, guardian angel, and our God!10Then nearest these, when others most remote;And all, ere long, shall be remote, but these.How dreadful, then, to meet them all alone,A stranger! unacknowledged, unapproved!Now woo them, wed them, bind them to thy breast;To win thy wish, creation has no more.Or if we wish a fourth, it is a friend—But friends, how mortal! dangerous the desire.Take Phœbus to yourselves, ye basking bards!19Inebriate at fair fortune’s fountain-head;And reeling through the wilderness of joy;Where sense runs savage, broke from reason’s chain,And sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall.My fortune is unlike; unlike my song;Unlike the deity my song invokes.I to Day’s soft-eyed sister pay my court(Endymion’s rival!), and her aid implore;Now first implored in succour to the Muse.Thou, who didst lately borrow[11]Cynthia’s form,And modestly forego thine own! O thou,30Who didst thyself at midnight hours inspire!Say, why not Cynthia patroness of song?As thou her crescent, she thy characterAssumes; still more a goddess by the change.Are there demurring wits, who dare disputeThis revolution in the world inspired?Ye train Pierian! to the lunar sphere,In silent hour address your ardent callFor aid immortal; less her brother’s right.She, with the spheres harmonious, nightly leads40The mazy dance, and hears their matchless strain;A strain for gods, denied to mortal ear.Transmit it heard, thou silver Queen of Heaven!What title, or what name, endears thee most?Cynthia! Cyllene! Phœbe!—or dost hearWith higher gust, fair P——d of the skies?Is that the soft enchantment calls thee down,More powerful than of old Circean charm?Come; but from heavenly banquets with thee bringThe soul of song, and whisper in my ear50The theft divine; or in propitious dreams(For dreams are thine) transfuse it through the breast52Of thy first votary—but not thy last;If, like thy namesake, thou art ever kind.And kind thou wilt be; kind on such a theme;A theme so like thee, a quite lunar theme,Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair!A theme that rose all pale, and told my soul,’Twas Night; on her fond hopes perpetual night;A night which struck a damp, a deadlier damp,60Than that which smote me from Philander’s tomb.Narcissa[12]follows, ere his tomb is closed.Woes cluster; rare are solitary woes;They love a train, they tread each other’s heel;Her death invades his mournful right, and claimsThe grief that started from my lids for him:Seizes the faithless, alienated tear,Or shares it, ere it falls. So frequent Death,Sorrow he more than causes, he confounds;For human sighs his rival strokes contend,70And make distress, distraction. Oh, Philander!What was thy fate? A double fate to me;Portent, and pain! a menace, and a blow!Like the black raven hovering o’er my peace,Not less a bird of omen, than of prey.It call’d Narcissa long before her hour;It call’d her tender soul, by break of bliss,From the first blossom, from the buds of joy;Those few our noxious fate unblasted leavesIn this inclement clime of human life.80Sweet harmonist! and beautiful as sweet!And young as beautiful! and soft as young!And gay as soft! and innocent as gay!And happy (if aught happy here) as good!For fortune fond had built her nest on high.85Like birds quite exquisite of note and plume,Transfix’d by fate (who loves a lofty mark),How from the summit of the grove she fell,And left it unharmonious! all its charmsExtinguish’d in the wonders of her song!Her song still vibrates in my ravish’d ear,Still melting there, and with voluptuous pain(O to forget her!) thrilling through my heart!93Song, beauty, youth, love, virtue, joy! this groupOf bright ideas, flowers of paradise,As yet unforfeit! in one blaze we bind,Kneel, and present it to the skies; as allWe guess of heaven: and these were all her own.And she was mine; and I was—was!—most blest!—Gay title of the deepest misery!100As bodies grow more ponderous, robb’d of life;Good lost weighs more in grief, than gain’d, in joy.Like blossom’d trees o’erturn’d by vernal storm,Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay;And if in death still lovely, lovelier there;Far lovelier! pity swells the tide of love.And will not the severe excuse a sigh?Scorn the proud man that is ashamed to weep;Our tears indulged, indeed deserve our shame.Ye that e’er lost an angel! pity me.110Soon as the lustre languish’d in her eye,Dawning a dimmer day on human sight;And on her cheek, the residence of spring,Pale omen sat; and scatter’d fears aroundOn all that saw; (and who would cease to gaze,That once had seen?) with haste, parental haste,I flew, I snatch’d her from the rigid north,Her native bed, on which bleak Boreas blew,And bore her nearer to the sun;[13]the sun119(As if the sun could envy) check’d his beam,Denied his wonted succour; nor with moreRegret beheld her drooping, than the bellsOf lilies; fairest lilies, not so fair!Queen lilies! and ye painted populace!Who dwell in fields, and lead ambrosial lives;In morn and evening dew your beauties bathe,And drink the sun; which gives your cheeks to glow,And out-blush (mine excepted) every fair;You gladlier grew, ambitious of her hand,Which often cropp’d your odours, incense meet130To thought so pure! Ye lovely fugitives!Coeval race with man! for man you smile;Why not smile at him too? You share indeedHis sudden pass; but not his constant pain.So man is made, nought ministers delight,By what his glowing passions can engage;And glowing passions, bent on aught below,Must, soon or late, with anguish turn the scale;And anguish, after rapture, how severe!Rapture? Bold man! who tempts the wrath divine,140By plucking fruit denied to mortal taste,While here, presuming on the rights of heaven.For transport dost thou call on every hour,Lorenzo? At thy friend’s expense be wise;Lean not on earth; ’twill pierce thee to the heart;A broken reed, at best; but, oft, a spear;On its sharp point peace bleeds, and hope expires.Turn, hopeless thought! turn from her:—thought repell’dResenting rallies, and wakes every woe.Snatch’d ere thy prime! and in thy bridal hour!150And when kind fortune, with thy lover, smiled!151And when high flavour’d thy fresh opening joys!And when blind man pronounced thy bliss complete!And on a foreign shore; where strangers wept!Strangers to thee; and, more surprising still,Strangers to kindness, wept: their eyes let fallInhuman tears: strange tears! that trickled downFrom marble hearts! obdurate tenderness!A tenderness that call’d them more severe;In spite of nature’s soft persuasion, steel’d;160While nature melted, superstition raved;That mourn’d the dead; and this denied a grave.Their sighs incensed; sighs foreign to the will!Their will the tiger suck’d, outraged the storm.For oh! the cursed ungodliness of zeal!While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursedIn blind infallibility’s embrace,The sainted spirit petrified the breast;Denied the charity of dust, to spreadO’er dust! a charity their dogs enjoy.170What could I do? what succour? what resource?With pious sacrilege, a grave I stole;With impious piety, that grave I wrong’d;Short in my duty; coward in my grief!More like her murderer, than friend, I crept,With soft-suspended step, and muffled deepIn midnight darkness, whisper’d my last sigh.I whisper’d what should echo through their realms;Nor writ her name, whose tomb should pierce the skies.Presumptuous fear! How durst I dread her foes,180While nature’s loudest dictates I obey’d?Pardon necessity, bless’d shade! of griefAnd indignation rival bursts I pour’d;Half execration mingled with my prayer;Kindled at man, while I his God adored;185Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust;Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.Glows my resentment into guilt? What guiltCan equal violations of the dead?The dead how sacred! Sacred is the dustOf this heaven-labour’d form, erect, divine!192This heaven-assumed majestic robe of earth,He deign’d to wear, who hung the vast expanseWith azure bright, and clothed the sun in gold.When every passion sleeps that can offend;When strikes us every motive that can melt;When man can wreak his rancour uncontroll’d,That strongest curb on insult and ill-will;Then, spleen to dust? the dust of innocence?200An angel’s dust?—This Lucifer transcends;When he contended for the patriarch’s bones,’Twas not the strife of malice, but of pride;The strife of pontiff pride, not pontiff gall.Far less than this is shocking in a raceMost wretched, but from streams of mutual love;And uncreated, but for love divine;And, but for love divine, this moment, lost,By fate resorb’d, and sunk in endless night.Man hard of heart to man! of horrid things210Most horrid! ’mid stupendous, highly strange!Yet oft his courtesies are smoother wrongs;Pride brandishes the favours He confers,And contumelious his humanity:What then his vengeance? Hear it not, ye stars!And thou, pale moon! turn paler at the sound;Man is to man the sorest, surest ill.A previous blast foretells the rising storm;O’erwhelming turrets threaten ere they fall;219Volcanos bellow ere they disembogue;Earth trembles ere her yawning jaws devour;And smoke betrays the wide-consuming fire:Ruin from man is most conceal’d when near,And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.Is this the flight of fancy? Would it were!Heaven’s Sovereign saves all beings, but himself,That hideous sight, a naked human heart.Fired is the Muse? And let the Muse be fired:Who not inflamed, when what he speaks, he feels,And in the nerve most tender, in his friends?230Shame to mankind! Philander had his foes;He felt the truths I sing, and I in him.But he, nor I, feel more: past ills, Narcissa!Are sunk in thee, thou recent wound of heart!Which bleeds with other cares, with other pangs;Pangs numerous, as the numerous ills that swarm’dO’er thy distinguish’d fate, and, clustering thereThick as the locusts on the land of Nile,Made death more deadly, and more dark the grave.Reflect (if not forgot my touching tale)240How was each circumstance with aspics arm’d?An aspic, each! and all, a hydra woe:What strong Herculean virtue could suffice?—Or is it virtue to be conquer’d here?This hoary cheek a train of tears bedews;And each tear mourns its own distinct distress;And each distress, distinctly mourn’d, demandsOf grief still more, as heighten’d by the whole.A grief like this proprietors excludes:Not friends alone such obsequies deplore;250They make mankind the mourner; carry sighsFar as the fatal fame can wing her way;And turn the gayest thought of gayest age,253Down their right channel, through the vale of death.The vale of death! that hush’d Cimmerian vale,Where darkness, brooding o’er unfinish’d fatesWith raven wing incumbent, waits the day(Dread day!) that interdicts all future change!That subterranean world, that land of ruin!Fit walk, Lorenzo, for proud human thought!There let my thought expatiate, and explore261Balsamic truths, and healing sentiments,Of all most wanted, and most welcome, here.For gay Lorenzo’s sake, and for thy own,My soul! “the fruits of dying friends survey;Expose the vain of life; weigh life and death;Give death his eulogy; thy fear subdue;And labour that first palm of noble minds,A manly scorn of terror from the tomb.”This harvest reap from thy Narcissa’s grave.270As poets feign’d from Ajax’ streaming bloodArose, with grief inscribed, a mournful flower;Let wisdom blossom from my mortal wound.And first, of dying friends; what fruit from these?It brings us more than triple aid; an aidTo chase our thoughtlessness, fear, pride, and guilt.Our dying friends come o’er us like a cloud,To damp our brainless ardours; and abateThat glare of life, which often blinds the wise.Our dying friends are pioneers, to smooth280Our rugged pass to death; to break those barsOf terror, and abhorrence, nature throwsCross our obstructed way; and, thus to makeWelcome, as safe, our port from every storm.Each friend by fate snatch’d from us, is a plumePluck’d from the wing of human vanity,Which makes us stoop from our aërial heights,287And, damp’d with omen of our own decease,On drooping pinions of ambition lower’d,Just skim earth’s surface, ere we break it up,O’er putrid earth to scratch a little dust,And save the world a nuisance. Smitten friendsAre angels sent on errands full of love;For us they languish, and for us they die:And shall they languish, shall they die, in vain?Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hovering shades,Which wait the revolution in our hearts?Shall we disdain their silent soft address;Their posthumous advice, and pious prayer?Senseless, as herds that graze their hallow’d graves,300Tread under foot their agonies and groans;Frustrate their anguish, and destroy their deaths?Lorenzo! no; the thought of death indulge;Give it its wholesome empire! let it reign,That kind chastiser of thy soul in joy!Its reign will spread thy glorious conquests far,And still the tumults of thy ruffled breast:Auspicious era! golden days, begin!The thought of death shall, like a god, inspire.And why not think on death? Is life the theme310Of every thought? and wish of every hour?And song of every joy? Surprising truth!The beaten spaniel’s fondness not so strange.To wave the numerous ills that seize on lifeAs their own property, their lawful prey;Ere man has measured half his weary stage,His luxuries have left him no reserve,No maiden relishes, unbroach’d delights;On cold served repetitions he subsists,And in the tasteless present chews the past;320Disgusted chews, and scarce can swallow down.321Like lavish ancestors, his earlier yearsHave disinherited his future hours,Which starve on orts, and glean their former field.Live ever here, Lorenzo?—shocking thought!So shocking, they who wish, disown it too;Disown from shame what they from folly crave.Live ever in the womb, nor see the light?For what live ever here?—With labouring stepTo tread our former footsteps? pace the round330Eternal? to climb life’s worn, heavy wheel,Which draws up nothing new? to beat, and beatThe beaten track? to bid each wretched dayThe former mock? to surfeit on the same,And yawn our joys? or thank a miseryFor change, though sad? to see what we have seen?Hear, till unheard, the same old slabber’d tale?To taste the tasted, and at each returnLess tasteful? o’er our palates to decantAnother vintage? strain a flatter year,340Through loaded vessels, and a laxer tone?Crazy machines to grind earth’s wasted fruits!Ill-ground, and worse concocted! load, not life!The rational foul kennels of excess!Still-streaming thoroughfares of dull debauch!Trembling each gulp, lest death should snatch the bowl.Such of our fine ones is the wish refined!So would they have it: elegant desire!Why not invite the bellowing stalls, and wilds?But such examples might their riot awe.350Through want of virtue, that is, want of thought(Though on bright thought they father all their flights),To what are they reduced? To love, and hate,The same vain world; to censure, and espouse,This painted shrew of life, who calls them fool355Each moment of each day; to flatter badThrough dread of worse; to cling to this rude rock,Barren, to them, of good, and sharp with ills,And hourly blacken’d with impending storms,And infamous for wrecks of human hope—Scared at the gloomy gulf, that yawns beneath,Such are their triumphs! such their pangs of joy!362’Tis time, high time, to shift this dismal scene.This hugg’d, this hideous state, what art can cure?One only; but that one, what all may reach;Virtue—she, wonder-working goddess! charmsThat rock to bloom; and tames the painted shrew;And what will more surprise, Lorenzo! givesTo life’s sick, nauseous iteration, change;And straightens nature’s circle to a line.370Believest thou this, Lorenzo? lend an ear,A patient ear, thou’lt blush to disbelieve.A languid, leaden iteration reigns,And ever must, o’er those, whose joys are joysOf sight, smell, taste: the cuckoo-seasons singThe same dull note to such as nothing prize,But what those seasons, from the teeming earth,To doating sense indulge. But nobler minds,Which relish fruits unripen’d by the sun,Make their days various; various as the dyes380On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d,On lighten’d minds, that bask in virtue’s beams,Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolvesIn that for which they long, for which they live.Their glorious efforts, wing’d with heavenly hope,Each rising morning sees still higher rise;Each bounteous dawn its novelty presentsTo worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;389While nature’s circle, like a chariot-wheelRolling beneath their elevated aims,Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;Advancing virtue, in a line to bliss;Virtue, which Christian motives best inspire!And bliss, which Christian schemes alone ensure!And shall we then, for virtue’s sake, commenceApostates, and turn infidels for joy?A truth it is, few doubt, but fewer trust,“He sins against this life, who slights the next.”What is this life? How few their favourite know!400Fond in the dark, and blind in our embrace,By passionately loving life, we makeLoved life unlovely; hugging her to death.We give to time eternity’s regard;And, dreaming, take our passage for our port.Life has no value as an end, but means;An end deplorable! a means divine!When ’tis our all, ’tis nothing; worse than nought;A nest of pains: when held as nothing, much:Like some fair humorists, life is most enjoy’d,410When courted least; most worth, when disesteem’d;Then ’tis the seat of comfort, rich in peace;In prospect richer far; important! awful!Not to be mention’d, but with shouts of praise!Not to be thought on, but with tides of joy!The mighty basis of eternal bliss!Where now the barren rock? the painted shrew?Where now, Lorenzo! life’s eternal round?Have I not made my triple promise good?Vain is the world; but only to the vain.420To what compare we then this varying scene,Whose worth ambiguous rises, and declines?Waxes, and wanes? (In all propitious, night423Assists me here) compare it to the moon;Dark in herself, and indigent; but richIn borrow’d lustre from a higher sphere.When gross guilt interposes, labouring earth,O’ershadow’d, mourns a deep eclipse of joy;Her joys, at brightest, pallid, to that fontOf full effulgent glory, whence they flow.430Nor is that glory distant: Oh, Lorenzo!A good man, and an angel! these betweenHow thin the barrier! What divides their fate?Perhaps a moment, or perhaps a year:Or, if an age, it is a moment still;A moment, or eternity’s forgot.Then be, what once they were, who now are gods;Be what Philander was, and claim the skies.Starts timid nature at the gloomy pass?The soft transition call it; and be cheer’d:440Such it is often, and why not to thee?To hope the best, is pious, brave, and wise;And may itself procure, what it presumes.Life is much flatter’d, death is much traduced;Compare the rivals, and the kinder crown.“Strange competition!”—True, Lorenzo! strange!So little life can cast into the scale.Life makes the soul dependent on the dust;Death gives her wings to mount above the spheres.Through chinks, styled organs, dim life peeps at light;Death bursts th’ involving cloud, and all is day;451All eye, all ear, the disembodied power.Death has feign’d evils, nature shall not feel;Life, ills substantial, wisdom cannot shun.Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven!By tyrant life dethroned, imprison’d, pain’d?By death enlarged, ennobled, deified?457Death but entombs the body; life the soul.“Is Death then guiltless? How he marks his wayWith dreadful waste of what deserves to shine!Art, genius, fortune, elevated power!With various lustres these light up the world,Which Death puts out, and darkens human race.”463I grant, Lorenzo! this indictment just:The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror!Death humbles these; more barbarous life, the man.Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay;Death, of the spirit infinite! divine!Death has no dread, but what frail life imparts;Nor life true joy, but what kind death improves.470No bliss has life to boast, till death can giveFar greater; life’s a debtor to the grave,Dark lattice! letting in eternal day.Lorenzo! blush at fondness for a life,Which sends celestial souls on errands vile,To cater for the sense; and serve at boards,Where every ranger of the wilds, perhapsEach reptile, justly claims our upper hand.Luxurious feast! a soul, a soul immortal,In all the dainties of a brute bemired!480Lorenzo! blush at terror for a death,Which gives thee to repose in festive bowers,Where nectars sparkle, angels minister,And more than angels share, and raise, and crown,And eternize, the birth, bloom, bursts of bliss.What need I more? O Death, the palm is thine.Then welcome, Death! thy dreaded harbingers,Age and disease; disease, though long my guest;That plucks my nerves, those tender strings of life;Which, pluck’d a little more, will toll the bell,490That calls my few friends to my funeral;491Where feeble nature drops, perhaps, a tear,While reason and religion, better taught,Congratulate the dead, and crown his tombWith wreath triumphant. Death is victory;It binds in chains the raging ills of life:Lust and ambition, wrath and avarice,Dragg’d at his chariot-wheel, applaud his power.That ills corrosive, cares importunate,Are not immortal too, O Death! is thine.500Our day of dissolution!—name it right;’Tis our great pay-day; ’tis our harvest, richAnd ripe: what though the sickle, sometimes keen,Just scars us as we reap the golden grain?More than thy balm, O Gilead! heals the wound.Birth’s feeble cry, and death’s deep dismal groan,Are slender tributes low-tax’d nature paysFor mighty gain: the gain of each, a life!But O! the last the former so transcends,Life dies, compared; life lives beyond the grave.510And feel I, Death! no joy from thought of thee?Death, the great counsellor, who man inspiresWith every nobler thought, and fairer deed!Death, the deliverer, who rescues man!Death, the rewarder, who the rescued crowns!Death, that absolves my birth; a curse without it!Rich death, that realises all my cares,Toils, virtues, hopes; without it a chimera!Death, of all pain the period, not of joy;Joy’s source, and subject, still subsist unhurt;520One, in my soul; and one, in her great Sire;Though the four winds were warring for my dust.Yes, and from winds, and waves, and central night,Though prison’d there, my dust too I reclaim(To dust when drop proud nature’s proudest spheres),And live entire. Death is the crown of life:526Were death denied, poor man would live in vain;Were death denied, to live would not be life;Were death denied, even fools would wish to die.Death wounds to cure: we fall; we rise; we reign!Spring from our fetters; fasten in the skies;Where blooming Eden withers in our sight:Death gives us more than was in Eden lost.This king of terrors is the prince of peace.When shall I die to vanity, pain, death?When shall I die?—When shall I live for ever?536THECHRISTIAN TRIUMPH:CONTAININGOUR ONLY CURE FOR THE FEAR OF DEATH;ANDPROPER SENTIMENTS OF HEART ON THATINESTIMABLE BLESSING.TO THEHONOURABLE MR YORKE.NIGHT FOURTH.THE CHRISTIAN TRIUMPH.A much-indebted muse, O Yorke! intrudes.Amid the smiles of fortune, and of youth,Thine ear is patient of a serious song.How deep implanted in the breast of manThe dread of death! I sing its sovereign cure.Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived,Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding manReceives, not suffers, Death’s tremendous blow.The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave;10The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm;These are the bugbears of a winter’s eve,The terrors of the living, not the dead.Imagination’s fool, and error’s wretch,Man makes a death, which nature never made;Then on the point of his own fancy falls;And feels a thousand deaths, in fearing one.But were death frightful, what has age to fear?If prudent, age should meet the friendly foe,And shelter in his hospitable gloom.20I scarce can meet a monument, but holdsMy younger; every date cries—“Come away.”And what recalls me? Look the world around,And tell me what: the wisest cannot tell.Should any born of woman give his thoughtFull range, on just dislike’s unbounded field;Of things, the vanity; of men, the flaws;Flaws in the best; the many, flaw all o’er;As leopards, spotted, or, as Ethiops, dark;Vivacious ill; good dying immature;30(How immature, Narcissa’s marble tells!)And at his death bequeathing endless pain;His heart, though bold, would sicken at the sight,And spend itself in sighs, for future scenes.But grant to life (and just it is to grantTo lucky life) some perquisites of joy;A time there is, when, like a thrice-told tale,Long-rifled life of sweet can yield no more,But from our comment on the comedy,Pleasing reflections on parts well sustain’d,40Or purposed emendations where we fail’d,Or hopes of plaudits from our candid Judge,When, on their exit, souls are bid unrobe,Toss fortune back her tinsel, and her plume,And drop this mask of flesh behind the scene.With me, that time is come; my world is dead;A new world rises, and new manners reign:Foreign comedians, a spruce band! arrive,To push me from the scene, or hiss me there.What a pert race starts up! the strangers gaze,50And I at them; my neighbour is unknown;Nor that the worst: ah me! the dire effectOf loitering here, of Death defrauded long;Of old so gracious (and let that suffice),54My very master knows me not.—Shall I dare say, peculiar is the fate?I’ve been so long remember’d, I’m forgot.An object ever pressing dims the sight,And hides behind its ardour to be seen.When in his courtiers’ ears I pour my plaint,60They drink it as the nectar of the great;And squeeze my hand, and beg me come to-morrow.Refusal! canst thou wear a smoother form?Indulge me, nor conceive I drop my theme:Who cheapens life, abates the fear of death:Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,Court favour, yet untaken, I besiege;Ambition’s ill-judged effort to be rich.Alas! ambition makes my little less;Embittering the possess’d: Why wish for more?70Wishing, of all employments, is the worst;Philosophy’s reverse; and health’s decay!Were I as plump as stall’d theology,Wishing would waste me to this shade again.Were I as wealthy as a South Sea dream,Wishing is an expedient to be poor.Wishing, that constant hectic of a fool;Caught at a court; purged off by purer air,And simpler diet; gifts of rural life!Bless’d be that hand divine, which gently laid80My heart at rest, beneath this humble shed.The world’s a stately bark, on dangerous seas,With pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril;Here, on a single plank, thrown safe ashore,I hear the tumult of the distant throng,As that of seas remote, or dying storms:And meditate on scenes, more silent still;Pursue my theme, and fight the fear of death.88Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut,Touching his reed, or leaning on his staff,Eager ambition’s fiery chace I see;I see the circling hunt, of noisy men,Burst law’s enclosure, leap the mounds of right,Pursuing, and pursued, each other’s prey;As wolves, for rapine; as the fox, for wiles;Till Death, that mighty hunter, earths them all.Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame?Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies:”And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.100If this song lives, posterity shall knowOne, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,Who thought even gold might come a day too late;Nor on his subtle death-bed plann’d his schemeFor future vacancies in Church or State;Some avocation deeming it—to die,Unbit by rage canine of dying rich;Guilt’s blunder! and the loudest laugh of hell.O my coevals! remnants of yourselves!Poor human ruins, tottering o’er the grave!110Shall we, shall aged men, like aged trees,Strike deeper their vile root, and closer cling,Still more enamour’d of this wretched soil?Shall our pale, wither’d hands, be still stretch’d out,Trembling, at once, with eagerness and age?With avarice, and convulsions, grasping hard?Grasping at air! for what has earth beside?Man wants but little; nor that little, long;How soon must he resign his very dust,Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!120Years unexperienced rush on numerous ills;And soon as man, expert from time, has found122The key of life, it opes the gates of death.When in this vale of years I backward look,And miss such numbers, numbers too of such,Firmer in health, and greener in their age,And stricter on their guard, and fitter farTo play life’s subtle game, I scarce believeI still survive: and am I fond of life,Who scarce can think it possible, I live?130Alive by miracle! or, what is next,Alive by Mead! if I am still alive,Who long have buried what gives life to live,Firmness of nerve, and energy of thought.Life’s lee is not more shallow, than impure,And vapid; sense and reason show the door,Call for my bier, and point me to the dust.O thou great arbiter of life and death!Nature’s immortal, immaterial Sun!Whose all-prolific beam late call’d me forth140From darkness, teeming darkness, where I layThe worm’s inferior, and, in rank, beneathThe dust I tread on, high to bear my brow,To drink the spirit of the golden day,And triumph in existence; and could knowNo motive, but my bliss; and hast ordain’dA rise in blessing! with the patriarch’s joy,Thy call I follow to the land unknown;I trust in thee, and know in whom I trust;Or life, or death, is equal; neither weighs:150All weight in this—O let me live to thee!Though nature’s terrors thus may be repress’d;Still frowns grim Death; guilt points the tyrant’s spear.And whence all human guilt? From death forgot.Ah me! too long I set at nought the swarmOf friendly warnings, which around me flew;156And smiled, unsmitten: small my cause to smile!Death’s admonitions, like shafts upwards shot,More dreadful by delay, the longer ereThey strike our hearts, the deeper is their wound;O think how deep, Lorenzo! here it stings:Who can appease its anguish? How it burns!162What hand the barb’d, envenom’d thought can draw?What healing hand can pour the balm of peace?And turn my sight undaunted on the tomb?With joy,—with grief, that healing hand I see;Ah! too conspicuous! it is fix’d on high.On high?—What means my phrensy? I blaspheme;Alas! how low! how far beneath the skies!The skies it form’d; and now it bleeds for me—170But bleeds the balm I want—yet still it bleeds;Draw the dire steel—ah, no! the dreadful blessingWhat heart or can sustain, or dares forego?There hangs all human hope: that nail supportsThe falling universe: that gone, we drop;Horror receives us, and the dismal wishCreation had been smother’d in her birth—Darkness his curtain, and his bed the dust;When stars and sun are dust beneath his throne!In heaven itself can such indulgence dwell?180Oh, what a groan was there! a groan not his.He seized our dreadful right; the load sustained;And heaved the mountain from a guilty world.A thousand worlds, so bought, were bought too dear;Sensations new in angels’ bosoms rise;Suspend their song; and make a pause in bliss.O for their song, to reach my lofty theme!Inspire me, Night! with all thy tuneful spheres;Whilst I with seraphs share seraphic themes,And show to men the dignity of man;190Lest I blaspheme my subject with my song.Shall Pagan pages glow celestial flame,And Christian languish? On our hearts, not heads,Falls the foul infamy: my heart! awake.What can awake thee, unawaked by this,“Expended deity on human weal?”Feel the great truths, which burst the tenfold nightOf heathen error, with a golden floodOf endless day: to feel, is to be fired;And to believe, Lorenzo! is to feel.200Thou most indulgent, most tremendous Power!Still more tremendous, for thy wondrous love!That arms, with awe more awful, thy commands;And foul transgression dips in sevenfold night;How our hearts tremble at thy love immense!In love immense, inviolably just!Thou, rather than thy justice should be stain’d,Didst stain the cross; and work of wonders farThe greatest, that thy dearest far might bleed.Bold thought! shall I dare speak it, or repress?210Should man more execrate, or boast, the guiltWhich roused such vengeance? which such love inflamed?O’er guilt (how mountainous!), with outstretch’d arms,Stern justice, and soft-smiling love embrace,Supporting, in full majesty, thy throne,When seem’d its majesty to need support,Or that, or man, inevitably lost:What, but the fathomless of thought divine,Could labour such expedient from despair,And rescue both? Both rescue! both exalt!220Oh, how are both exalted by the deed!The wondrous deed! or shall I call it more?A wonder in omnipotence itself!223A mystery no less to gods than men!Not, thus, our infidels th’ Eternal draw,A God all o’er, consummate, absolute,Full-orb’d, in his whole round of rays complete:They set at odds Heaven’s jarring attributes;And, with one excellence, another wound;Maim Heaven’s perfection, break its equal beams,Bid mercy triumph over—God himself,231Undeified by their opprobrious praise:A God all mercy, is a God unjust.Ye brainless wits! ye baptized infidels!Ye worse for mending! wash’d to fouler stains!The ransom was paid down; the fund of heaven,Heaven’s inexhaustible, exhausted fund,Amazing, and amazed, pour’d forth the price,All price beyond: though curious to compute,Archangels fail’d to cast the mighty sum:240Its value vast, ungrasp’d by minds create,For ever hides, and glows, in the Supreme.And was the ransom paid? It was: and paid(What can exalt the bounty more?) for you.The sun beheld it—No! the shocking scene,Drove back his chariot: midnight veil’d his face;Not such as this; not such as nature makes;A midnight nature shudder’d to behold;A midnight new! a dread eclipse (withoutOpposing spheres) from her Creator’s frown!250Sun! didst thou fly thy Maker’s pain? or startAt that enormous load of human guilt,Which bow’d His blessed head; o’erwhelm’d His cross;Made groan the centre; burst earth’s marble womb,With pangs, strange pangs! deliver’d of her dead?Hell howl’d; and heaven that hour let fall a tear;Heaven wept, that men might smile! Heaven bled, that manMight never die!——And is devotion virtue? ’Tis compell’d.259What heart of stone but glows at thoughts like these?Such contemplations mount us; and should mountThe mind still higher; nor ever glance on man,Unraptured, uninflamed.—Where roll my thoughtsTo rest from wonders? Other wonders rise;And strike where’er they roll: my soul is caught:Heaven’s sovereign blessings, clustering from the cross,Rush on her, in a throng, and close her round,The prisoner of amaze!—In his bless’d life,I see the path, and, in his death, the price,And in his great ascent, the proof supreme270Of immortality.—And did he rise?[14]Hear, O ye nations! hear it, O ye dead!He rose! he rose! he burst the bars of death.Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!And give the King of glory to come in.Who is the King of glory? He who leftHis throne of glory, for the pang of death:Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!And give the King of glory to come in.Who is the King of glory? He who slew280The ravenous foe, that gorged all human race!The King of glory, he whose glory fill’dHeaven with amazement at his love to man;And with divine complacency beheldPowers most illumined, wilder’d in the theme.The theme, the joy, how then shall man sustain?O the burst gates! crush’d sting! demolish’d throne!Last gasp of vanquish’d Death! Shout earth and heaven!This sum of good to man. Whose nature thenTook wing, and mounted with him from the tomb!290Then, then, I rose; then first humanity291Triumphant pass’d the crystal ports of light(Stupendous guest!), and seized eternal youth,Seized in our name. E’er since, ’tis blasphemousTo call man mortal. Man’s mortalityWas then transferr’d to death; and heaven’s durationUnalienably seal’d to this frail frame,This child of dust—Man, all-immortal! hail;Hail, Heaven! all lavish of strange gifts to man!Thine all the glory; man’s the boundless bliss.300Where am I rapt by this triumphant theme?On Christian joy’s exulting wing, aboveTh’ Aonian mount?—Alas! small cause for joy!What if to pain immortal? if extentOf being, to preclude a close of woe?Where, then, my boast of immortality?I boast it still, though cover’d o’er with guilt;For guilt, not innocence, his life he pour’d;’Tis guilt alone can justify his death;Nor that, unless his death can justify310Relenting guilt in Heaven’s indulgent sight.If, sick of folly, I relent; he writesMy name in heaven with that inverted spear(A spear deep-dipp’d in blood!) which pierced his side,And open’d there a font for all mankind,Who strive, who combat crimes, to drink, and live:This, only this, subdues the fear of death.And what is this?—Survey the wondrous cure:And at each step, let higher wonder rise!“Pardon for infinite offence! and pardon320Through means that speak its value infinite!A pardon bought with blood! with blood divine!With blood divine of Him I made my foe!Persisted to provoke! though woo’d and awed,Bless’d and chastised, a flagrant rebel still!325A rebel, ’midst the thunders of his throne!Nor I alone! a rebel universe!My species up in arms! not one exempt!Yet for the foulest of the foul, he dies,Most joy’d, for the redeem’d from deepest guilt!As if our race were held of highest rank;And Godhead dearer, as more kind to man!”332Bound, every heart! and every bosom, burn!O what a scale of miracles is here!Its lowest round, high planted on the skies;Its towering summit lost beyond the thoughtOf man or angel! O that I could climbThe wonderful ascent, with equal praise!Praise! flow for ever (if astonishmentWill give thee leave) my praise! for ever flow;340Praise ardent, cordial, constant, to high HeavenMore fragrant, than Arabia sacrificed,And all her spicy mountains in a flame.So dear, so due to Heaven, shall praise descend,With her soft plume (from plausive angel’s wingFirst pluck’d by man) to tickle mortal ears,Thus diving in the pockets of the great?Is praise the perquisite of every paw,Though black as hell, that grapples well for gold?O love of gold! thou meanest of amours!350Shall praise her odours waste on Virtue’s dead,Embalm the base, perfume the stench of guilt,Earn dirty bread by washing Æthiops fair,Removing filth, or sinking it from sight,A scavenger in scenes, where vacant posts,Like gibbets yet untenanted, expectTheir future ornaments? From courts and thrones,Return, apostate praise! thou vagabond!Thou prostitute! to thy first love return,395Thy first, thy greatest, once unrivall’d theme.There flow redundant; like Meander flow,Back to thy fountain; to that parent Power,Who gives the tongue to sound, the thought to soar,The soul to be. Men homage pay to men,Thoughtless beneath whose dreadful eye they bowIn mutual awe profound, of clay to clay,Of guilt to guilt; and turn their back on thee,Great Sire! whom thrones celestial ceaseless sing;To prostrate angels, an amazing scene!O the presumption of man’s awe for man!—370Man’s author! end! restorer! law! and judge!Thine, all; day thine, and thine this gloom of night,With all her wealth, with all her radiant worlds:What, night eternal, but a frown from thee?What, heaven’s meridian glory, but thy smile?And shall not praise be thine? not human praise?While heaven’s high host on hallelujahs live?O may I breathe no longer, than I breatheMy soul in praise to Him, who gave my soul,And all her infinite of prospect fair,380Cut through the shades of hell great Love! by theeO most adorable! most unadored!Where shall that praise begin, which ne’er should end?Where’er I turn, what claim on all applause!How is night’s sable mantle labour’d o’er,How richly wrought with attributes divine!What wisdom shines! what love! This midnight pomp,This gorgeous arch, with golden worlds inlaid!Built with divine ambition! nought to thee;For others this profusion: Thou, apart,390Above! beyond! O tell me, mighty Mind!Where art thou? Shall I dive into the deep,Call to the sun, or ask the roaring winds,393For their Creator? Shall I question loudThe thunder, if in that th’ Almighty dwells?Or holds He furious storms in straiten’d reins,And bids fierce whirlwinds wheel his rapid car?What mean these questions?—Trembling I retract;My prostrate soul adores the present God:Praise I a distant deity? He tunes400My voice (if tuned); the nerve, that writes, sustains:Wrapp’d in his being, I resound his praise:But though past all diffused, without a shore,His essence; local is his throne (as meet),To gather the dispersed (as standards callThe listed from afar): to fix a point,A central point, collective of his sons,Since finite every nature but his own.The nameless He, whose nod is nature’s birth;And nature’s shield, the shadow of his hand;410Her dissolution, his suspended smile!The great First-Last! pavilion’d high he sits,In darkness from excessive splendour borne,By gods unseen, unless through lustre lost.His glory, to created glory, bright,As that to central horrors; he looks downOn all that soars; and spans immensity.Though night unnumber’d worlds unfolds to view,Boundless creation! what art thou? A beam,A mere effluvium of his majesty:420And shall an atom of this atom-worldMutter, in dust and sin, the theme of heaven?Down to the centre should I send my thoughtThrough beds of glittering ore, and glowing gems,Their beggar’d blaze wants lustre for my lay;Goes out in darkness: if, on towering wing,I send it through the boundless vault of stars!427The stars, though rich, what dross their gold to thee,Great, good, wise, wonderful, eternal King!If to those conscious stars thy throne around,Praise ever-pouring, and imbibing bliss;And ask their strain; they want it, more they want,Poor their abundance, humble their sublime,433Languid their energy, their ardour cold,Indebted still, their highest rapture burns;Short of its mark, defective, though divine.Still more—this theme is man’s, and man’s alone;Their vast appointments reach it not: they seeOn earth a bounty not indulged on high;And downward look for heaven’s superior praise!440First-born of ether! high in fields of light!View man, to see the glory of your God!Could angels envy, they had envied here;And some did envy; and the rest, though gods,Yet still gods unredeem’d (their triumphs man,Tempted to weigh the dust against the skies),They less would feel, though more adorn, my theme.They sung creation (for in that they shared);How rose in melody, that child of love!Creation’s great superior, man! is thine;450Thine is redemption; they just gave the key:’Tis thine to raise, and eternize, the song;Though human, yet divine; for should not thisRaise man o’er man, and kindle seraphs here?Redemption! ’twas creation more sublime;Redemption! ’twas the labour of the skies;Far more than labour—it was death in heaven.A truth so strange! ’twere bold to think it true;If not far bolder still to disbelieve.459Here pause, and ponder—Was there death in heaven?What then on earth? on earth, which struck the blow?Who struck it? Who?—O how is man enlarged,462Seen through this medium! How the pigmy towers!How counterpoised his origin from dust!How counterpoised to dust his sad return!How voided his vast distance from the skies!How near he presses on the seraph’s wing!Which is the seraph? Which the born of clay?How this demonstrates, through the thickest cloudOf guilt, and clay condensed, the son of heaven!470The double son; the made, and the re-made!And shall heaven’s double property be lost?Man’s double madness only can destroy.To man the bleeding cross has promised all;The bleeding cross has sworn eternal grace;Who gave his life, what grace shall he deny?O ye who, from this Rock of Ages, leap,Apostates, plunging headlong in the deep!What cordial joy, what consolation strong,Whatever winds arise, or billows roll,480Our interest in the Master of the storm!Cling there, and in wreck’d nature’s ruins smile;While vile apostates tremble in a calm.Man! know thyself. All wisdom centres there;To none man seems ignoble, but to man;Angels that grandeur, men o’erlook, admire:How long shall human nature be their book,Degenerate mortal! and unread by thee?The beam dim reason sheds shows wonders there;What high contents! illustrious faculties!490But the grand comment, which displays at fullOur human height, scarce sever’d from divine,By heaven composed, was publish’d on the Cross.Who looks on that, and sees not in himselfAn awful stranger, a terrestrial god?495A glorious partner with the DeityIn that high attribute, immortal life?If a god bleeds, he bleeds not for a worm:I gaze, and, as I gaze, my mounting soulCatches strange fire, eternity! at thee;And drops the world—or rather, more enjoys:How changed the face of nature! how improved!502What seem’d a chaos, shines a glorious world,Or, what a world, an Eden; heighten’d all!It is another scene! another self!And still another, as time rolls along;And that a self far more illustrious still.Beyond long ages, yet roll’d up in shadesUnpierced by bold conjecture’s keenest ray,What evolutions of surprising fate!510How nature opens, and receives my soulIn boundless walks of raptured thought! where godsEncounter and embrace me! What new birthsOf strange adventure, foreign to the sun,Where what now charms, perhaps, whate’er exists,Old time, and fair creation, are forgot!Is this extravagant? Of man we formExtravagant conception, to be just:Conception unconfined wants wings to reach him:Beyond its reach, the Godhead only, more.520He, the great Father! kindled at one flameThe world of rationals; one spirit pour’dFrom spirit’s awful fountain; pour’d himselfThrough all their souls; but not in equal stream,Profuse, or frugal, of th’ inspiring God,As his wise plan demanded; and when pastTheir various trials, in their various spheres,If they continue rational, as made,Resorbs them all into himself again;529His throne their centre, and his smile their crown.Why doubt we, then, the glorious truth to sing,Though yet unsung, as deem’d, perhaps, too bold?Angels are men of a superior kind;Angels are men in lighter habit clad,High o’er celestial mountains wing’d in flight;And men are angels, loaded for an hour,Who wade this miry vale, and climb with pain,And slippery step, the bottom of the steep.Angels their failings, mortals have their praise;While here, of corps ethereal, such enroll’d,540And summon’d to the glorious standard soon,Which flames eternal crimson through the skies.Nor are our brothers thoughtless of their kin,Yet absent; but not absent from their love.Michael has fought our battles; Raphael sungOur triumphs; Gabriel on our errands flown,Sent by the Sovereign: and are these, O Man!Thy friends, thy warm allies? and thou (shame burnThe cheek to cinder!) rival to the brute?Religion’s all. Descending from the skies550To wretched man, the goddess, in her left,Holds out this world, and, in her right, the next;Religion! the sole voucher man is man;Supporter sole of man above himself;Even in this night of frailty, change, and death,She gives the soul a soul that acts a god.Religion! Providence! an After-state!Here is firm footing; here is solid rock!This can support us; all is sea besides;Sinks under us; bestorms, and then devours.560His hand the good man fastens on the skies,And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl.As when a wretch, from thick polluted air,563Darkness, and stench, and suffocating damps,And dungeon horrors, by kind fate, discharged,Climbs some fair eminence, where ether pureSurrounds him, and Elysian prospects rise,His heart exults, his spirits cast their load;As if new-born, he triumphs in the change;So joys the soul, when, from inglorious aims,And sordid sweets, from feculence and froth571Of ties terrestrial, set at large, she mountsTo reason’s region, her own element,Breathes hopes immortal, and affects the skies.Religion! thou the soul of happiness;And, groaning Calvary, of thee! there shineThe noblest truths; there strongest motives sting;There sacred violence assaults the soul;There, nothing but compulsion is forborne.Can love allure us? or can terror awe?580He weeps!—the falling drop puts out the sun;He sighs—the sigh earth’s deep foundation shakes.If in his love so terrible, what thenHis wrath inflamed? his tenderness on fire?Like soft, smooth oil, outblazing other fires?Can prayer, can praise avert it?—Thou, my all!My theme! my inspiration! and my crown!My strength in age! my rise in low estate!My soul’s ambition, pleasure, wealth!—my world!My light in darkness! and my life in death!590My boast through time! bliss through eternity!Eternity, too short to speak thy praise!Or fathom thy profound of love to man!To man of men the meanest, even to me;My sacrifice! my God!—what things are these!What then art Thou? by what name shall I call thee?—Knew I the name devout archangels use,597Devout archangels should the name enjoy,By me unrivall’d; thousands more sublime,None half so dear as that which, though unspoke,Still glows at heart: O how omnipotenceIs lost in love! Thou great Philanthropist!Father of angels! but the friend of man!603Like Jacob, fondest of the younger born!Thou, who didst save him, snatch the smoking brandFrom out the flames, and quench it in thy blood!How art thou pleased, by bounty to distress!To make us groan beneath our gratitude,Too big for birth! to favour, and confound;To challenge, and to distance all return!610Of lavish love stupendous heights to soar,And leave praise panting in the distant vale!Thy right, too great, defrauds thee of thy due;And sacrilegious our sublimest song.But since the naked will obtains thy smile,Beneath this monument of praise unpaid,And future life symphonious to my strain,(That noblest hymn to heaven!) for ever lieEntomb’d my fear of death! and every fear,The dread of every evil, but thy frown.620Whom see I yonder, so demurely smile?Laughter a labour, and might break their rest.Ye quietists, in homage to the skies!Serene! of soft address! who mildly makeAn unobtrusive tender of your hearts,Abhorring violence! who halt indeed;But, for the blessing, wrestle not with Heaven!Think you my song too turbulent? too warm?Are passions, then, the Pagans of the soul?Reason alone baptized? alone ordain’d630To touch things sacred? Oh for warmer still!631Guilt chills my zeal, and age benumbs my powers;Oh for an humbler heart, and prouder song!Thou, my much-injured theme! with that soft eye,Which melted o’er doom’d Salem, deign to lookCompassion to the coldness of my breast;And pardon to the winter in my strain.O ye cold-hearted, frozen, formalists!On such a theme, ’tis impious to be calm;Passion is reason, transport temper, here.640Shall Heaven, which gave us ardour, and has shownHer own for man so strongly, not disdainWhat smooth emollients in theology,Recumbent virtue’s downy doctors preach,That prose of piety, a lukewarm praise?Rise odours sweet from incense uninflamed?Devotion, when lukewarm, is undevout;But when it glows, its heat is struck to heaven;To human hearts her golden harps are strung;High heaven’s orchestra chants amen to man.650Hear I, or dream I hear, their distant strain,Sweet to the soul, and tasting strong of heaven,Soft-wafted on celestial pity’s plume,Through the vast spaces of the universe,To cheer me in this melancholy gloom?Oh, when will death (now stingless), like a friend,Admit me of their choir? Oh, when will deathThis mouldering, old, partition-wall throw down?Give beings, one in nature, one abode?O Death divine! that givest us to the skies!660Great future! glorious patron of the past,And present! when shall I thy shrine adore?From nature’s continent, immensely wide,Immensely bless’d, this little isle of life,This dark, incarcerating colony,665Divides us. Happy day! that breaks our chain;That manumits;[15]that calls from exile home;That leads to nature’s great metropolis,And re-admits us, through the guardian handOf elder brothers, to our Father’s throne;Who hears our Advocate, and, through his woundsBeholding man, allows that tender name.672’Tis this makes Christian triumph a command:’Tis this makes joy a duty to the wise;’Tis impious in a good man to be sad.See thou, Lorenzo! where hangs all our hope?Touch’d by the Cross, we live; or, more than die;That touch which touch’d not angels; more divineThan that which touch’d confusion into form,And darkness into glory; partial touch!680Ineffably pre-eminent regard!Sacred to man, and sovereign through the wholeLong golden chain of miracles, which hangsFrom heaven through all duration, and supportsIn one illustrious and amazing plan,Thy welfare, nature! and thy God’s renown.That touch, with charm celestial, heals the soulDiseased, drives pain from guilt, lights life in death,Turns earth to heaven, to heavenly thrones transformsThe ghastly ruins of the mouldering tomb.690Dost ask me when? When He who died returns;Returns, how changed! Where then the man of woe?In glory’s terrors all the Godhead burns;And all his courts, exhausted by the tideOf deities triumphant in his train,Leave a stupendous solitude in heaven;Replenish’d soon, replenish’d with increaseOf pomp, and multitude; a radiant band698Of angels new; of angels from the tomb.Is this by fancy thrown remote? and riseDark doubts between the promise and event?I send thee not to volumes for thy cure;Read nature; nature is a friend to truth;Nature is Christian; preaches to mankind;And bids dead matter aid us in our creed.Hast thou ne’er seen the comet’s flaming flight?Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror shedsOn gazing nations; from his fiery trainOf length enormous, takes his ample round709Through depths of ether; coasts unnumber’d worlds,Of more than solar glory; doubles wideHeaven’s mighty cape; and then revisits earth,From the long travel of a thousand years.Thus, at the destined period, shall returnHe, once on earth, who bids the comet blaze:And, with him, all our triumph o’er the tomb.Nature is dumb on this important point;Or hope precarious in low whisper breathes;Faith speaks aloud, distinct; even adders hear;But turn, and dart into the dark again.720Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death,To break the shock blind nature cannot shun,And lands thought smoothly on the farther shore.Death’s terror is the mountain faith removes;That mountain barrier between man and peace.’Tis faith disarms destruction; and absolvesFrom every clamorous charge, the guiltless tomb.Why disbelieve? Lorenzo!—“Reason bids,All-sacred reason.”—Hold her sacred still;Nor shalt thou want a rival in thy flame:730All-sacred reason! source, and soul, of allDemanding praise, on earth, or earth above!732My heart is thine: deep in its inmost folds,Live thou with life; live dearer of the two.Wear I the blessed cross, by fortune stamp’dOn passive nature, before thought was born?My birth’s blind bigot! fired with local zeal!No; reason re-baptized me when adult;Weigh’d true, and false, in her impartial scale;My heart became the convert of my head;740And made that choice, which once was but my fate.“On argument alone my faith is built:”Reason pursued is faith; and, unpursuedWhere proof invites, ’tis reason, then, no more:And such our proof, that, or our faith is right,Or reason lies, and Heaven design’d it wrong:Absolve we this? What, then, is blasphemy?Fond as we are, and justly fond, of faith,Reason, we grant, demands our first regard;The mother honour’d, as the daughter dear.750Reason the root, fair faith is but the flower;The fading flower shall die; but reason livesImmortal, as her Father in the skies.When faith is virtue, reason makes it so.Wrong not the Christian; think not reason yours:’Tis reason our great Master holds so dear;’Tis reason’s injured rights his wrath resents;’Tis reason’s voice obey’d his glories crown;To give lost reason life, he pour’d his own:Believe, and show the reason of a man;760Believe, and taste the pleasure of a God;Believe, and look with triumph on the tomb:Through reason’s wounds alone thy faith can die;Which dying, tenfold terror gives to death,And dips in venom his twice-mortal sting.Learn hence what honours, what loud pæans[16], due766To those, who push our antidote aside;Those boasted friends to reason, and to man,Whose fatal love stabs every joy, and leavesDeath’s terror heighten’d, gnawing on his heart.Those pompous sons of reason idolizedAnd vilified at once; of reason dead,Then deified, as monarchs were of old;773What conduct plants proud laurels on their brow?While love of truth through all their camp resounds,They draw pride’s curtain o’er the noontide ray,Spike up their inch of reason, on the pointOf philosophic wit, call’d argument;And then, exulting in their taper, cry,“Behold the sun!” and, Indian-like, adore.780Talk they of morals? O thou bleeding Love!Thou maker of new morals to mankind!The grand morality is love of thee.As wise as Socrates, if such they were(Nor will they bate of that sublime renown),As wise as Socrates, might justly standThe definition of a modern fool.A Christian is the highest style of man:And is there, who the blessed cross wipes off,As a foul blot from his dishonour’d brow?790If angels tremble, ’tis at such a sight:The wretch they quit, desponding of their charge,More struck with grief or wonder, who can tell?Ye sold to sense! ye citizens of earth!(For such alone the Christian banner fly)Know ye how wise your choice, how great your gain?Behold the picture of earth’s happiest man:“He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back,And says, he call’d another; that arrives,Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on;800Till one calls him, who varies not his call,But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound,Till nature dies, and judgment sets him free;A freedom far less welcome than his chain.”But grant man happy; grant him happy long;Add to life’s highest prize her latest hour;That hour, so late, is nimble in approach,That, like a post, comes on in full career:How swift the shuttle flies that weaves thy shroud!Where is the fable of thy former years?810Thrown down the gulf of time; as far from theeAs they had ne’er been thine; the day in hand,Like a bird struggling to get loose, is going;Scarce now possess’d, so suddenly ’tis gone;And each swift moment fled, is death advancedBy strides as swift. Eternity is all;And whose eternity? Who triumphs there?Bathing for ever in the font of bliss!For ever basking in the Deity!Lorenzo! who?—Thy conscience shall reply.820O give it leave to speak! ’twill speak ere long,Thy leave unask’d; Lorenzo! hear it now,While useful its advice, its accents mild.By the great edict, the divine decree,Truth is deposited with man’s last hour;An honest hour, and faithful to her trust;Truth, eldest daughter of the Deity;Truth, of his council, when he made the worlds;Nor less, when he shall judge the worlds he made;Though silent long, and sleeping ne’er so sound,830Smother’d with errors, and oppress’d with toys,That heaven-commission’d hour no sooner calls,But from her cavern in the soul’s abyss,Like him they fable under Ætna whelm’d,834The goddess bursts in thunder, and in flame;Loudly convinces, and severely pains.Dark demons I discharge, and hydra-stings;The keen vibration of bright truth—is hell:Just definition! though by schools untaught.Ye deaf to truth! peruse this parson’d page,840And trust, for once, a prophet, and a priest;“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”

TO HER GRACETHE DUCHESS OF P——.[10]

Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.—Virg.

Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.—Virg.

Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.—Virg.

NIGHT THIRD.

From dreams, where thought in fancy’s maze runs mad,To reason, that heaven-lighted lamp in man,Once more I wake; and at the destined hour,Punctual as lovers to the moment sworn,I keep my assignation with my woe.Oh! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought,Lost to the noble sallies of the soul!Who think it solitude to be alone.Communion sweet! communion large and high!Our reason, guardian angel, and our God!10Then nearest these, when others most remote;And all, ere long, shall be remote, but these.How dreadful, then, to meet them all alone,A stranger! unacknowledged, unapproved!Now woo them, wed them, bind them to thy breast;To win thy wish, creation has no more.Or if we wish a fourth, it is a friend—But friends, how mortal! dangerous the desire.Take Phœbus to yourselves, ye basking bards!19Inebriate at fair fortune’s fountain-head;And reeling through the wilderness of joy;Where sense runs savage, broke from reason’s chain,And sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall.My fortune is unlike; unlike my song;Unlike the deity my song invokes.I to Day’s soft-eyed sister pay my court(Endymion’s rival!), and her aid implore;Now first implored in succour to the Muse.Thou, who didst lately borrow[11]Cynthia’s form,And modestly forego thine own! O thou,30Who didst thyself at midnight hours inspire!Say, why not Cynthia patroness of song?As thou her crescent, she thy characterAssumes; still more a goddess by the change.Are there demurring wits, who dare disputeThis revolution in the world inspired?Ye train Pierian! to the lunar sphere,In silent hour address your ardent callFor aid immortal; less her brother’s right.She, with the spheres harmonious, nightly leads40The mazy dance, and hears their matchless strain;A strain for gods, denied to mortal ear.Transmit it heard, thou silver Queen of Heaven!What title, or what name, endears thee most?Cynthia! Cyllene! Phœbe!—or dost hearWith higher gust, fair P——d of the skies?Is that the soft enchantment calls thee down,More powerful than of old Circean charm?Come; but from heavenly banquets with thee bringThe soul of song, and whisper in my ear50The theft divine; or in propitious dreams(For dreams are thine) transfuse it through the breast52Of thy first votary—but not thy last;If, like thy namesake, thou art ever kind.And kind thou wilt be; kind on such a theme;A theme so like thee, a quite lunar theme,Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair!A theme that rose all pale, and told my soul,’Twas Night; on her fond hopes perpetual night;A night which struck a damp, a deadlier damp,60Than that which smote me from Philander’s tomb.Narcissa[12]follows, ere his tomb is closed.Woes cluster; rare are solitary woes;They love a train, they tread each other’s heel;Her death invades his mournful right, and claimsThe grief that started from my lids for him:Seizes the faithless, alienated tear,Or shares it, ere it falls. So frequent Death,Sorrow he more than causes, he confounds;For human sighs his rival strokes contend,70And make distress, distraction. Oh, Philander!What was thy fate? A double fate to me;Portent, and pain! a menace, and a blow!Like the black raven hovering o’er my peace,Not less a bird of omen, than of prey.It call’d Narcissa long before her hour;It call’d her tender soul, by break of bliss,From the first blossom, from the buds of joy;Those few our noxious fate unblasted leavesIn this inclement clime of human life.80Sweet harmonist! and beautiful as sweet!And young as beautiful! and soft as young!And gay as soft! and innocent as gay!And happy (if aught happy here) as good!For fortune fond had built her nest on high.85Like birds quite exquisite of note and plume,Transfix’d by fate (who loves a lofty mark),How from the summit of the grove she fell,And left it unharmonious! all its charmsExtinguish’d in the wonders of her song!Her song still vibrates in my ravish’d ear,Still melting there, and with voluptuous pain(O to forget her!) thrilling through my heart!93Song, beauty, youth, love, virtue, joy! this groupOf bright ideas, flowers of paradise,As yet unforfeit! in one blaze we bind,Kneel, and present it to the skies; as allWe guess of heaven: and these were all her own.And she was mine; and I was—was!—most blest!—Gay title of the deepest misery!100As bodies grow more ponderous, robb’d of life;Good lost weighs more in grief, than gain’d, in joy.Like blossom’d trees o’erturn’d by vernal storm,Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay;And if in death still lovely, lovelier there;Far lovelier! pity swells the tide of love.And will not the severe excuse a sigh?Scorn the proud man that is ashamed to weep;Our tears indulged, indeed deserve our shame.Ye that e’er lost an angel! pity me.110Soon as the lustre languish’d in her eye,Dawning a dimmer day on human sight;And on her cheek, the residence of spring,Pale omen sat; and scatter’d fears aroundOn all that saw; (and who would cease to gaze,That once had seen?) with haste, parental haste,I flew, I snatch’d her from the rigid north,Her native bed, on which bleak Boreas blew,And bore her nearer to the sun;[13]the sun119(As if the sun could envy) check’d his beam,Denied his wonted succour; nor with moreRegret beheld her drooping, than the bellsOf lilies; fairest lilies, not so fair!Queen lilies! and ye painted populace!Who dwell in fields, and lead ambrosial lives;In morn and evening dew your beauties bathe,And drink the sun; which gives your cheeks to glow,And out-blush (mine excepted) every fair;You gladlier grew, ambitious of her hand,Which often cropp’d your odours, incense meet130To thought so pure! Ye lovely fugitives!Coeval race with man! for man you smile;Why not smile at him too? You share indeedHis sudden pass; but not his constant pain.So man is made, nought ministers delight,By what his glowing passions can engage;And glowing passions, bent on aught below,Must, soon or late, with anguish turn the scale;And anguish, after rapture, how severe!Rapture? Bold man! who tempts the wrath divine,140By plucking fruit denied to mortal taste,While here, presuming on the rights of heaven.For transport dost thou call on every hour,Lorenzo? At thy friend’s expense be wise;Lean not on earth; ’twill pierce thee to the heart;A broken reed, at best; but, oft, a spear;On its sharp point peace bleeds, and hope expires.Turn, hopeless thought! turn from her:—thought repell’dResenting rallies, and wakes every woe.Snatch’d ere thy prime! and in thy bridal hour!150And when kind fortune, with thy lover, smiled!151And when high flavour’d thy fresh opening joys!And when blind man pronounced thy bliss complete!And on a foreign shore; where strangers wept!Strangers to thee; and, more surprising still,Strangers to kindness, wept: their eyes let fallInhuman tears: strange tears! that trickled downFrom marble hearts! obdurate tenderness!A tenderness that call’d them more severe;In spite of nature’s soft persuasion, steel’d;160While nature melted, superstition raved;That mourn’d the dead; and this denied a grave.Their sighs incensed; sighs foreign to the will!Their will the tiger suck’d, outraged the storm.For oh! the cursed ungodliness of zeal!While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursedIn blind infallibility’s embrace,The sainted spirit petrified the breast;Denied the charity of dust, to spreadO’er dust! a charity their dogs enjoy.170What could I do? what succour? what resource?With pious sacrilege, a grave I stole;With impious piety, that grave I wrong’d;Short in my duty; coward in my grief!More like her murderer, than friend, I crept,With soft-suspended step, and muffled deepIn midnight darkness, whisper’d my last sigh.I whisper’d what should echo through their realms;Nor writ her name, whose tomb should pierce the skies.Presumptuous fear! How durst I dread her foes,180While nature’s loudest dictates I obey’d?Pardon necessity, bless’d shade! of griefAnd indignation rival bursts I pour’d;Half execration mingled with my prayer;Kindled at man, while I his God adored;185Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust;Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.Glows my resentment into guilt? What guiltCan equal violations of the dead?The dead how sacred! Sacred is the dustOf this heaven-labour’d form, erect, divine!192This heaven-assumed majestic robe of earth,He deign’d to wear, who hung the vast expanseWith azure bright, and clothed the sun in gold.When every passion sleeps that can offend;When strikes us every motive that can melt;When man can wreak his rancour uncontroll’d,That strongest curb on insult and ill-will;Then, spleen to dust? the dust of innocence?200An angel’s dust?—This Lucifer transcends;When he contended for the patriarch’s bones,’Twas not the strife of malice, but of pride;The strife of pontiff pride, not pontiff gall.Far less than this is shocking in a raceMost wretched, but from streams of mutual love;And uncreated, but for love divine;And, but for love divine, this moment, lost,By fate resorb’d, and sunk in endless night.Man hard of heart to man! of horrid things210Most horrid! ’mid stupendous, highly strange!Yet oft his courtesies are smoother wrongs;Pride brandishes the favours He confers,And contumelious his humanity:What then his vengeance? Hear it not, ye stars!And thou, pale moon! turn paler at the sound;Man is to man the sorest, surest ill.A previous blast foretells the rising storm;O’erwhelming turrets threaten ere they fall;219Volcanos bellow ere they disembogue;Earth trembles ere her yawning jaws devour;And smoke betrays the wide-consuming fire:Ruin from man is most conceal’d when near,And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.Is this the flight of fancy? Would it were!Heaven’s Sovereign saves all beings, but himself,That hideous sight, a naked human heart.Fired is the Muse? And let the Muse be fired:Who not inflamed, when what he speaks, he feels,And in the nerve most tender, in his friends?230Shame to mankind! Philander had his foes;He felt the truths I sing, and I in him.But he, nor I, feel more: past ills, Narcissa!Are sunk in thee, thou recent wound of heart!Which bleeds with other cares, with other pangs;Pangs numerous, as the numerous ills that swarm’dO’er thy distinguish’d fate, and, clustering thereThick as the locusts on the land of Nile,Made death more deadly, and more dark the grave.Reflect (if not forgot my touching tale)240How was each circumstance with aspics arm’d?An aspic, each! and all, a hydra woe:What strong Herculean virtue could suffice?—Or is it virtue to be conquer’d here?This hoary cheek a train of tears bedews;And each tear mourns its own distinct distress;And each distress, distinctly mourn’d, demandsOf grief still more, as heighten’d by the whole.A grief like this proprietors excludes:Not friends alone such obsequies deplore;250They make mankind the mourner; carry sighsFar as the fatal fame can wing her way;And turn the gayest thought of gayest age,253Down their right channel, through the vale of death.The vale of death! that hush’d Cimmerian vale,Where darkness, brooding o’er unfinish’d fatesWith raven wing incumbent, waits the day(Dread day!) that interdicts all future change!That subterranean world, that land of ruin!Fit walk, Lorenzo, for proud human thought!There let my thought expatiate, and explore261Balsamic truths, and healing sentiments,Of all most wanted, and most welcome, here.For gay Lorenzo’s sake, and for thy own,My soul! “the fruits of dying friends survey;Expose the vain of life; weigh life and death;Give death his eulogy; thy fear subdue;And labour that first palm of noble minds,A manly scorn of terror from the tomb.”This harvest reap from thy Narcissa’s grave.270As poets feign’d from Ajax’ streaming bloodArose, with grief inscribed, a mournful flower;Let wisdom blossom from my mortal wound.And first, of dying friends; what fruit from these?It brings us more than triple aid; an aidTo chase our thoughtlessness, fear, pride, and guilt.Our dying friends come o’er us like a cloud,To damp our brainless ardours; and abateThat glare of life, which often blinds the wise.Our dying friends are pioneers, to smooth280Our rugged pass to death; to break those barsOf terror, and abhorrence, nature throwsCross our obstructed way; and, thus to makeWelcome, as safe, our port from every storm.Each friend by fate snatch’d from us, is a plumePluck’d from the wing of human vanity,Which makes us stoop from our aërial heights,287And, damp’d with omen of our own decease,On drooping pinions of ambition lower’d,Just skim earth’s surface, ere we break it up,O’er putrid earth to scratch a little dust,And save the world a nuisance. Smitten friendsAre angels sent on errands full of love;For us they languish, and for us they die:And shall they languish, shall they die, in vain?Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hovering shades,Which wait the revolution in our hearts?Shall we disdain their silent soft address;Their posthumous advice, and pious prayer?Senseless, as herds that graze their hallow’d graves,300Tread under foot their agonies and groans;Frustrate their anguish, and destroy their deaths?Lorenzo! no; the thought of death indulge;Give it its wholesome empire! let it reign,That kind chastiser of thy soul in joy!Its reign will spread thy glorious conquests far,And still the tumults of thy ruffled breast:Auspicious era! golden days, begin!The thought of death shall, like a god, inspire.And why not think on death? Is life the theme310Of every thought? and wish of every hour?And song of every joy? Surprising truth!The beaten spaniel’s fondness not so strange.To wave the numerous ills that seize on lifeAs their own property, their lawful prey;Ere man has measured half his weary stage,His luxuries have left him no reserve,No maiden relishes, unbroach’d delights;On cold served repetitions he subsists,And in the tasteless present chews the past;320Disgusted chews, and scarce can swallow down.321Like lavish ancestors, his earlier yearsHave disinherited his future hours,Which starve on orts, and glean their former field.Live ever here, Lorenzo?—shocking thought!So shocking, they who wish, disown it too;Disown from shame what they from folly crave.Live ever in the womb, nor see the light?For what live ever here?—With labouring stepTo tread our former footsteps? pace the round330Eternal? to climb life’s worn, heavy wheel,Which draws up nothing new? to beat, and beatThe beaten track? to bid each wretched dayThe former mock? to surfeit on the same,And yawn our joys? or thank a miseryFor change, though sad? to see what we have seen?Hear, till unheard, the same old slabber’d tale?To taste the tasted, and at each returnLess tasteful? o’er our palates to decantAnother vintage? strain a flatter year,340Through loaded vessels, and a laxer tone?Crazy machines to grind earth’s wasted fruits!Ill-ground, and worse concocted! load, not life!The rational foul kennels of excess!Still-streaming thoroughfares of dull debauch!Trembling each gulp, lest death should snatch the bowl.Such of our fine ones is the wish refined!So would they have it: elegant desire!Why not invite the bellowing stalls, and wilds?But such examples might their riot awe.350Through want of virtue, that is, want of thought(Though on bright thought they father all their flights),To what are they reduced? To love, and hate,The same vain world; to censure, and espouse,This painted shrew of life, who calls them fool355Each moment of each day; to flatter badThrough dread of worse; to cling to this rude rock,Barren, to them, of good, and sharp with ills,And hourly blacken’d with impending storms,And infamous for wrecks of human hope—Scared at the gloomy gulf, that yawns beneath,Such are their triumphs! such their pangs of joy!362’Tis time, high time, to shift this dismal scene.This hugg’d, this hideous state, what art can cure?One only; but that one, what all may reach;Virtue—she, wonder-working goddess! charmsThat rock to bloom; and tames the painted shrew;And what will more surprise, Lorenzo! givesTo life’s sick, nauseous iteration, change;And straightens nature’s circle to a line.370Believest thou this, Lorenzo? lend an ear,A patient ear, thou’lt blush to disbelieve.A languid, leaden iteration reigns,And ever must, o’er those, whose joys are joysOf sight, smell, taste: the cuckoo-seasons singThe same dull note to such as nothing prize,But what those seasons, from the teeming earth,To doating sense indulge. But nobler minds,Which relish fruits unripen’d by the sun,Make their days various; various as the dyes380On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d,On lighten’d minds, that bask in virtue’s beams,Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolvesIn that for which they long, for which they live.Their glorious efforts, wing’d with heavenly hope,Each rising morning sees still higher rise;Each bounteous dawn its novelty presentsTo worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;389While nature’s circle, like a chariot-wheelRolling beneath their elevated aims,Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;Advancing virtue, in a line to bliss;Virtue, which Christian motives best inspire!And bliss, which Christian schemes alone ensure!And shall we then, for virtue’s sake, commenceApostates, and turn infidels for joy?A truth it is, few doubt, but fewer trust,“He sins against this life, who slights the next.”What is this life? How few their favourite know!400Fond in the dark, and blind in our embrace,By passionately loving life, we makeLoved life unlovely; hugging her to death.We give to time eternity’s regard;And, dreaming, take our passage for our port.Life has no value as an end, but means;An end deplorable! a means divine!When ’tis our all, ’tis nothing; worse than nought;A nest of pains: when held as nothing, much:Like some fair humorists, life is most enjoy’d,410When courted least; most worth, when disesteem’d;Then ’tis the seat of comfort, rich in peace;In prospect richer far; important! awful!Not to be mention’d, but with shouts of praise!Not to be thought on, but with tides of joy!The mighty basis of eternal bliss!Where now the barren rock? the painted shrew?Where now, Lorenzo! life’s eternal round?Have I not made my triple promise good?Vain is the world; but only to the vain.420To what compare we then this varying scene,Whose worth ambiguous rises, and declines?Waxes, and wanes? (In all propitious, night423Assists me here) compare it to the moon;Dark in herself, and indigent; but richIn borrow’d lustre from a higher sphere.When gross guilt interposes, labouring earth,O’ershadow’d, mourns a deep eclipse of joy;Her joys, at brightest, pallid, to that fontOf full effulgent glory, whence they flow.430Nor is that glory distant: Oh, Lorenzo!A good man, and an angel! these betweenHow thin the barrier! What divides their fate?Perhaps a moment, or perhaps a year:Or, if an age, it is a moment still;A moment, or eternity’s forgot.Then be, what once they were, who now are gods;Be what Philander was, and claim the skies.Starts timid nature at the gloomy pass?The soft transition call it; and be cheer’d:440Such it is often, and why not to thee?To hope the best, is pious, brave, and wise;And may itself procure, what it presumes.Life is much flatter’d, death is much traduced;Compare the rivals, and the kinder crown.“Strange competition!”—True, Lorenzo! strange!So little life can cast into the scale.Life makes the soul dependent on the dust;Death gives her wings to mount above the spheres.Through chinks, styled organs, dim life peeps at light;Death bursts th’ involving cloud, and all is day;451All eye, all ear, the disembodied power.Death has feign’d evils, nature shall not feel;Life, ills substantial, wisdom cannot shun.Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven!By tyrant life dethroned, imprison’d, pain’d?By death enlarged, ennobled, deified?457Death but entombs the body; life the soul.“Is Death then guiltless? How he marks his wayWith dreadful waste of what deserves to shine!Art, genius, fortune, elevated power!With various lustres these light up the world,Which Death puts out, and darkens human race.”463I grant, Lorenzo! this indictment just:The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror!Death humbles these; more barbarous life, the man.Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay;Death, of the spirit infinite! divine!Death has no dread, but what frail life imparts;Nor life true joy, but what kind death improves.470No bliss has life to boast, till death can giveFar greater; life’s a debtor to the grave,Dark lattice! letting in eternal day.Lorenzo! blush at fondness for a life,Which sends celestial souls on errands vile,To cater for the sense; and serve at boards,Where every ranger of the wilds, perhapsEach reptile, justly claims our upper hand.Luxurious feast! a soul, a soul immortal,In all the dainties of a brute bemired!480Lorenzo! blush at terror for a death,Which gives thee to repose in festive bowers,Where nectars sparkle, angels minister,And more than angels share, and raise, and crown,And eternize, the birth, bloom, bursts of bliss.What need I more? O Death, the palm is thine.Then welcome, Death! thy dreaded harbingers,Age and disease; disease, though long my guest;That plucks my nerves, those tender strings of life;Which, pluck’d a little more, will toll the bell,490That calls my few friends to my funeral;491Where feeble nature drops, perhaps, a tear,While reason and religion, better taught,Congratulate the dead, and crown his tombWith wreath triumphant. Death is victory;It binds in chains the raging ills of life:Lust and ambition, wrath and avarice,Dragg’d at his chariot-wheel, applaud his power.That ills corrosive, cares importunate,Are not immortal too, O Death! is thine.500Our day of dissolution!—name it right;’Tis our great pay-day; ’tis our harvest, richAnd ripe: what though the sickle, sometimes keen,Just scars us as we reap the golden grain?More than thy balm, O Gilead! heals the wound.Birth’s feeble cry, and death’s deep dismal groan,Are slender tributes low-tax’d nature paysFor mighty gain: the gain of each, a life!But O! the last the former so transcends,Life dies, compared; life lives beyond the grave.510And feel I, Death! no joy from thought of thee?Death, the great counsellor, who man inspiresWith every nobler thought, and fairer deed!Death, the deliverer, who rescues man!Death, the rewarder, who the rescued crowns!Death, that absolves my birth; a curse without it!Rich death, that realises all my cares,Toils, virtues, hopes; without it a chimera!Death, of all pain the period, not of joy;Joy’s source, and subject, still subsist unhurt;520One, in my soul; and one, in her great Sire;Though the four winds were warring for my dust.Yes, and from winds, and waves, and central night,Though prison’d there, my dust too I reclaim(To dust when drop proud nature’s proudest spheres),And live entire. Death is the crown of life:526Were death denied, poor man would live in vain;Were death denied, to live would not be life;Were death denied, even fools would wish to die.Death wounds to cure: we fall; we rise; we reign!Spring from our fetters; fasten in the skies;Where blooming Eden withers in our sight:Death gives us more than was in Eden lost.This king of terrors is the prince of peace.When shall I die to vanity, pain, death?When shall I die?—When shall I live for ever?536

From dreams, where thought in fancy’s maze runs mad,

To reason, that heaven-lighted lamp in man,

Once more I wake; and at the destined hour,

Punctual as lovers to the moment sworn,

I keep my assignation with my woe.

Oh! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought,

Lost to the noble sallies of the soul!

Who think it solitude to be alone.

Communion sweet! communion large and high!

Our reason, guardian angel, and our God!10

Then nearest these, when others most remote;

And all, ere long, shall be remote, but these.

How dreadful, then, to meet them all alone,

A stranger! unacknowledged, unapproved!

Now woo them, wed them, bind them to thy breast;

To win thy wish, creation has no more.

Or if we wish a fourth, it is a friend—

But friends, how mortal! dangerous the desire.

Take Phœbus to yourselves, ye basking bards!19

Inebriate at fair fortune’s fountain-head;

And reeling through the wilderness of joy;

Where sense runs savage, broke from reason’s chain,

And sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall.

My fortune is unlike; unlike my song;

Unlike the deity my song invokes.

I to Day’s soft-eyed sister pay my court

(Endymion’s rival!), and her aid implore;

Now first implored in succour to the Muse.

Thou, who didst lately borrow[11]Cynthia’s form,

And modestly forego thine own! O thou,30

Who didst thyself at midnight hours inspire!

Say, why not Cynthia patroness of song?

As thou her crescent, she thy character

Assumes; still more a goddess by the change.

Are there demurring wits, who dare dispute

This revolution in the world inspired?

Ye train Pierian! to the lunar sphere,

In silent hour address your ardent call

For aid immortal; less her brother’s right.

She, with the spheres harmonious, nightly leads40

The mazy dance, and hears their matchless strain;

A strain for gods, denied to mortal ear.

Transmit it heard, thou silver Queen of Heaven!

What title, or what name, endears thee most?

Cynthia! Cyllene! Phœbe!—or dost hear

With higher gust, fair P——d of the skies?

Is that the soft enchantment calls thee down,

More powerful than of old Circean charm?

Come; but from heavenly banquets with thee bring

The soul of song, and whisper in my ear50

The theft divine; or in propitious dreams

(For dreams are thine) transfuse it through the breast52

Of thy first votary—but not thy last;

If, like thy namesake, thou art ever kind.

And kind thou wilt be; kind on such a theme;

A theme so like thee, a quite lunar theme,

Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair!

A theme that rose all pale, and told my soul,

’Twas Night; on her fond hopes perpetual night;

A night which struck a damp, a deadlier damp,60

Than that which smote me from Philander’s tomb.

Narcissa[12]follows, ere his tomb is closed.

Woes cluster; rare are solitary woes;

They love a train, they tread each other’s heel;

Her death invades his mournful right, and claims

The grief that started from my lids for him:

Seizes the faithless, alienated tear,

Or shares it, ere it falls. So frequent Death,

Sorrow he more than causes, he confounds;

For human sighs his rival strokes contend,70

And make distress, distraction. Oh, Philander!

What was thy fate? A double fate to me;

Portent, and pain! a menace, and a blow!

Like the black raven hovering o’er my peace,

Not less a bird of omen, than of prey.

It call’d Narcissa long before her hour;

It call’d her tender soul, by break of bliss,

From the first blossom, from the buds of joy;

Those few our noxious fate unblasted leaves

In this inclement clime of human life.80

Sweet harmonist! and beautiful as sweet!

And young as beautiful! and soft as young!

And gay as soft! and innocent as gay!

And happy (if aught happy here) as good!

For fortune fond had built her nest on high.85

Like birds quite exquisite of note and plume,

Transfix’d by fate (who loves a lofty mark),

How from the summit of the grove she fell,

And left it unharmonious! all its charms

Extinguish’d in the wonders of her song!

Her song still vibrates in my ravish’d ear,

Still melting there, and with voluptuous pain

(O to forget her!) thrilling through my heart!93

Song, beauty, youth, love, virtue, joy! this group

Of bright ideas, flowers of paradise,

As yet unforfeit! in one blaze we bind,

Kneel, and present it to the skies; as all

We guess of heaven: and these were all her own.

And she was mine; and I was—was!—most blest!—

Gay title of the deepest misery!100

As bodies grow more ponderous, robb’d of life;

Good lost weighs more in grief, than gain’d, in joy.

Like blossom’d trees o’erturn’d by vernal storm,

Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay;

And if in death still lovely, lovelier there;

Far lovelier! pity swells the tide of love.

And will not the severe excuse a sigh?

Scorn the proud man that is ashamed to weep;

Our tears indulged, indeed deserve our shame.

Ye that e’er lost an angel! pity me.110

Soon as the lustre languish’d in her eye,

Dawning a dimmer day on human sight;

And on her cheek, the residence of spring,

Pale omen sat; and scatter’d fears around

On all that saw; (and who would cease to gaze,

That once had seen?) with haste, parental haste,

I flew, I snatch’d her from the rigid north,

Her native bed, on which bleak Boreas blew,

And bore her nearer to the sun;[13]the sun119

(As if the sun could envy) check’d his beam,

Denied his wonted succour; nor with more

Regret beheld her drooping, than the bells

Of lilies; fairest lilies, not so fair!

Queen lilies! and ye painted populace!

Who dwell in fields, and lead ambrosial lives;

In morn and evening dew your beauties bathe,

And drink the sun; which gives your cheeks to glow,

And out-blush (mine excepted) every fair;

You gladlier grew, ambitious of her hand,

Which often cropp’d your odours, incense meet130

To thought so pure! Ye lovely fugitives!

Coeval race with man! for man you smile;

Why not smile at him too? You share indeed

His sudden pass; but not his constant pain.

So man is made, nought ministers delight,

By what his glowing passions can engage;

And glowing passions, bent on aught below,

Must, soon or late, with anguish turn the scale;

And anguish, after rapture, how severe!

Rapture? Bold man! who tempts the wrath divine,140

By plucking fruit denied to mortal taste,

While here, presuming on the rights of heaven.

For transport dost thou call on every hour,

Lorenzo? At thy friend’s expense be wise;

Lean not on earth; ’twill pierce thee to the heart;

A broken reed, at best; but, oft, a spear;

On its sharp point peace bleeds, and hope expires.

Turn, hopeless thought! turn from her:—thought repell’d

Resenting rallies, and wakes every woe.

Snatch’d ere thy prime! and in thy bridal hour!150

And when kind fortune, with thy lover, smiled!151

And when high flavour’d thy fresh opening joys!

And when blind man pronounced thy bliss complete!

And on a foreign shore; where strangers wept!

Strangers to thee; and, more surprising still,

Strangers to kindness, wept: their eyes let fall

Inhuman tears: strange tears! that trickled down

From marble hearts! obdurate tenderness!

A tenderness that call’d them more severe;

In spite of nature’s soft persuasion, steel’d;160

While nature melted, superstition raved;

That mourn’d the dead; and this denied a grave.

Their sighs incensed; sighs foreign to the will!

Their will the tiger suck’d, outraged the storm.

For oh! the cursed ungodliness of zeal!

While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursed

In blind infallibility’s embrace,

The sainted spirit petrified the breast;

Denied the charity of dust, to spread

O’er dust! a charity their dogs enjoy.170

What could I do? what succour? what resource?

With pious sacrilege, a grave I stole;

With impious piety, that grave I wrong’d;

Short in my duty; coward in my grief!

More like her murderer, than friend, I crept,

With soft-suspended step, and muffled deep

In midnight darkness, whisper’d my last sigh.

I whisper’d what should echo through their realms;

Nor writ her name, whose tomb should pierce the skies.

Presumptuous fear! How durst I dread her foes,180

While nature’s loudest dictates I obey’d?

Pardon necessity, bless’d shade! of grief

And indignation rival bursts I pour’d;

Half execration mingled with my prayer;

Kindled at man, while I his God adored;185

Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust;

Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity

(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.

Glows my resentment into guilt? What guilt

Can equal violations of the dead?

The dead how sacred! Sacred is the dust

Of this heaven-labour’d form, erect, divine!192

This heaven-assumed majestic robe of earth,

He deign’d to wear, who hung the vast expanse

With azure bright, and clothed the sun in gold.

When every passion sleeps that can offend;

When strikes us every motive that can melt;

When man can wreak his rancour uncontroll’d,

That strongest curb on insult and ill-will;

Then, spleen to dust? the dust of innocence?200

An angel’s dust?—This Lucifer transcends;

When he contended for the patriarch’s bones,

’Twas not the strife of malice, but of pride;

The strife of pontiff pride, not pontiff gall.

Far less than this is shocking in a race

Most wretched, but from streams of mutual love;

And uncreated, but for love divine;

And, but for love divine, this moment, lost,

By fate resorb’d, and sunk in endless night.

Man hard of heart to man! of horrid things210

Most horrid! ’mid stupendous, highly strange!

Yet oft his courtesies are smoother wrongs;

Pride brandishes the favours He confers,

And contumelious his humanity:

What then his vengeance? Hear it not, ye stars!

And thou, pale moon! turn paler at the sound;

Man is to man the sorest, surest ill.

A previous blast foretells the rising storm;

O’erwhelming turrets threaten ere they fall;219

Volcanos bellow ere they disembogue;

Earth trembles ere her yawning jaws devour;

And smoke betrays the wide-consuming fire:

Ruin from man is most conceal’d when near,

And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.

Is this the flight of fancy? Would it were!

Heaven’s Sovereign saves all beings, but himself,

That hideous sight, a naked human heart.

Fired is the Muse? And let the Muse be fired:

Who not inflamed, when what he speaks, he feels,

And in the nerve most tender, in his friends?230

Shame to mankind! Philander had his foes;

He felt the truths I sing, and I in him.

But he, nor I, feel more: past ills, Narcissa!

Are sunk in thee, thou recent wound of heart!

Which bleeds with other cares, with other pangs;

Pangs numerous, as the numerous ills that swarm’d

O’er thy distinguish’d fate, and, clustering there

Thick as the locusts on the land of Nile,

Made death more deadly, and more dark the grave.

Reflect (if not forgot my touching tale)240

How was each circumstance with aspics arm’d?

An aspic, each! and all, a hydra woe:

What strong Herculean virtue could suffice?—

Or is it virtue to be conquer’d here?

This hoary cheek a train of tears bedews;

And each tear mourns its own distinct distress;

And each distress, distinctly mourn’d, demands

Of grief still more, as heighten’d by the whole.

A grief like this proprietors excludes:

Not friends alone such obsequies deplore;250

They make mankind the mourner; carry sighs

Far as the fatal fame can wing her way;

And turn the gayest thought of gayest age,253

Down their right channel, through the vale of death.

The vale of death! that hush’d Cimmerian vale,

Where darkness, brooding o’er unfinish’d fates

With raven wing incumbent, waits the day

(Dread day!) that interdicts all future change!

That subterranean world, that land of ruin!

Fit walk, Lorenzo, for proud human thought!

There let my thought expatiate, and explore261

Balsamic truths, and healing sentiments,

Of all most wanted, and most welcome, here.

For gay Lorenzo’s sake, and for thy own,

My soul! “the fruits of dying friends survey;

Expose the vain of life; weigh life and death;

Give death his eulogy; thy fear subdue;

And labour that first palm of noble minds,

A manly scorn of terror from the tomb.”

This harvest reap from thy Narcissa’s grave.270

As poets feign’d from Ajax’ streaming blood

Arose, with grief inscribed, a mournful flower;

Let wisdom blossom from my mortal wound.

And first, of dying friends; what fruit from these?

It brings us more than triple aid; an aid

To chase our thoughtlessness, fear, pride, and guilt.

Our dying friends come o’er us like a cloud,

To damp our brainless ardours; and abate

That glare of life, which often blinds the wise.

Our dying friends are pioneers, to smooth280

Our rugged pass to death; to break those bars

Of terror, and abhorrence, nature throws

Cross our obstructed way; and, thus to make

Welcome, as safe, our port from every storm.

Each friend by fate snatch’d from us, is a plume

Pluck’d from the wing of human vanity,

Which makes us stoop from our aërial heights,287

And, damp’d with omen of our own decease,

On drooping pinions of ambition lower’d,

Just skim earth’s surface, ere we break it up,

O’er putrid earth to scratch a little dust,

And save the world a nuisance. Smitten friends

Are angels sent on errands full of love;

For us they languish, and for us they die:

And shall they languish, shall they die, in vain?

Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hovering shades,

Which wait the revolution in our hearts?

Shall we disdain their silent soft address;

Their posthumous advice, and pious prayer?

Senseless, as herds that graze their hallow’d graves,300

Tread under foot their agonies and groans;

Frustrate their anguish, and destroy their deaths?

Lorenzo! no; the thought of death indulge;

Give it its wholesome empire! let it reign,

That kind chastiser of thy soul in joy!

Its reign will spread thy glorious conquests far,

And still the tumults of thy ruffled breast:

Auspicious era! golden days, begin!

The thought of death shall, like a god, inspire.

And why not think on death? Is life the theme310

Of every thought? and wish of every hour?

And song of every joy? Surprising truth!

The beaten spaniel’s fondness not so strange.

To wave the numerous ills that seize on life

As their own property, their lawful prey;

Ere man has measured half his weary stage,

His luxuries have left him no reserve,

No maiden relishes, unbroach’d delights;

On cold served repetitions he subsists,

And in the tasteless present chews the past;320

Disgusted chews, and scarce can swallow down.321

Like lavish ancestors, his earlier years

Have disinherited his future hours,

Which starve on orts, and glean their former field.

Live ever here, Lorenzo?—shocking thought!

So shocking, they who wish, disown it too;

Disown from shame what they from folly crave.

Live ever in the womb, nor see the light?

For what live ever here?—With labouring step

To tread our former footsteps? pace the round330

Eternal? to climb life’s worn, heavy wheel,

Which draws up nothing new? to beat, and beat

The beaten track? to bid each wretched day

The former mock? to surfeit on the same,

And yawn our joys? or thank a misery

For change, though sad? to see what we have seen?

Hear, till unheard, the same old slabber’d tale?

To taste the tasted, and at each return

Less tasteful? o’er our palates to decant

Another vintage? strain a flatter year,340

Through loaded vessels, and a laxer tone?

Crazy machines to grind earth’s wasted fruits!

Ill-ground, and worse concocted! load, not life!

The rational foul kennels of excess!

Still-streaming thoroughfares of dull debauch!

Trembling each gulp, lest death should snatch the bowl.

Such of our fine ones is the wish refined!

So would they have it: elegant desire!

Why not invite the bellowing stalls, and wilds?

But such examples might their riot awe.350

Through want of virtue, that is, want of thought

(Though on bright thought they father all their flights),

To what are they reduced? To love, and hate,

The same vain world; to censure, and espouse,

This painted shrew of life, who calls them fool355

Each moment of each day; to flatter bad

Through dread of worse; to cling to this rude rock,

Barren, to them, of good, and sharp with ills,

And hourly blacken’d with impending storms,

And infamous for wrecks of human hope—

Scared at the gloomy gulf, that yawns beneath,

Such are their triumphs! such their pangs of joy!362

’Tis time, high time, to shift this dismal scene.

This hugg’d, this hideous state, what art can cure?

One only; but that one, what all may reach;

Virtue—she, wonder-working goddess! charms

That rock to bloom; and tames the painted shrew;

And what will more surprise, Lorenzo! gives

To life’s sick, nauseous iteration, change;

And straightens nature’s circle to a line.370

Believest thou this, Lorenzo? lend an ear,

A patient ear, thou’lt blush to disbelieve.

A languid, leaden iteration reigns,

And ever must, o’er those, whose joys are joys

Of sight, smell, taste: the cuckoo-seasons sing

The same dull note to such as nothing prize,

But what those seasons, from the teeming earth,

To doating sense indulge. But nobler minds,

Which relish fruits unripen’d by the sun,

Make their days various; various as the dyes380

On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.

On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d,

On lighten’d minds, that bask in virtue’s beams,

Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves

In that for which they long, for which they live.

Their glorious efforts, wing’d with heavenly hope,

Each rising morning sees still higher rise;

Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents

To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;389

While nature’s circle, like a chariot-wheel

Rolling beneath their elevated aims,

Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;

Advancing virtue, in a line to bliss;

Virtue, which Christian motives best inspire!

And bliss, which Christian schemes alone ensure!

And shall we then, for virtue’s sake, commence

Apostates, and turn infidels for joy?

A truth it is, few doubt, but fewer trust,

“He sins against this life, who slights the next.”

What is this life? How few their favourite know!400

Fond in the dark, and blind in our embrace,

By passionately loving life, we make

Loved life unlovely; hugging her to death.

We give to time eternity’s regard;

And, dreaming, take our passage for our port.

Life has no value as an end, but means;

An end deplorable! a means divine!

When ’tis our all, ’tis nothing; worse than nought;

A nest of pains: when held as nothing, much:

Like some fair humorists, life is most enjoy’d,410

When courted least; most worth, when disesteem’d;

Then ’tis the seat of comfort, rich in peace;

In prospect richer far; important! awful!

Not to be mention’d, but with shouts of praise!

Not to be thought on, but with tides of joy!

The mighty basis of eternal bliss!

Where now the barren rock? the painted shrew?

Where now, Lorenzo! life’s eternal round?

Have I not made my triple promise good?

Vain is the world; but only to the vain.420

To what compare we then this varying scene,

Whose worth ambiguous rises, and declines?

Waxes, and wanes? (In all propitious, night423

Assists me here) compare it to the moon;

Dark in herself, and indigent; but rich

In borrow’d lustre from a higher sphere.

When gross guilt interposes, labouring earth,

O’ershadow’d, mourns a deep eclipse of joy;

Her joys, at brightest, pallid, to that font

Of full effulgent glory, whence they flow.430

Nor is that glory distant: Oh, Lorenzo!

A good man, and an angel! these between

How thin the barrier! What divides their fate?

Perhaps a moment, or perhaps a year:

Or, if an age, it is a moment still;

A moment, or eternity’s forgot.

Then be, what once they were, who now are gods;

Be what Philander was, and claim the skies.

Starts timid nature at the gloomy pass?

The soft transition call it; and be cheer’d:440

Such it is often, and why not to thee?

To hope the best, is pious, brave, and wise;

And may itself procure, what it presumes.

Life is much flatter’d, death is much traduced;

Compare the rivals, and the kinder crown.

“Strange competition!”—True, Lorenzo! strange!

So little life can cast into the scale.

Life makes the soul dependent on the dust;

Death gives her wings to mount above the spheres.

Through chinks, styled organs, dim life peeps at light;

Death bursts th’ involving cloud, and all is day;451

All eye, all ear, the disembodied power.

Death has feign’d evils, nature shall not feel;

Life, ills substantial, wisdom cannot shun.

Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven!

By tyrant life dethroned, imprison’d, pain’d?

By death enlarged, ennobled, deified?457

Death but entombs the body; life the soul.

“Is Death then guiltless? How he marks his way

With dreadful waste of what deserves to shine!

Art, genius, fortune, elevated power!

With various lustres these light up the world,

Which Death puts out, and darkens human race.”463

I grant, Lorenzo! this indictment just:

The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror!

Death humbles these; more barbarous life, the man.

Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay;

Death, of the spirit infinite! divine!

Death has no dread, but what frail life imparts;

Nor life true joy, but what kind death improves.470

No bliss has life to boast, till death can give

Far greater; life’s a debtor to the grave,

Dark lattice! letting in eternal day.

Lorenzo! blush at fondness for a life,

Which sends celestial souls on errands vile,

To cater for the sense; and serve at boards,

Where every ranger of the wilds, perhaps

Each reptile, justly claims our upper hand.

Luxurious feast! a soul, a soul immortal,

In all the dainties of a brute bemired!480

Lorenzo! blush at terror for a death,

Which gives thee to repose in festive bowers,

Where nectars sparkle, angels minister,

And more than angels share, and raise, and crown,

And eternize, the birth, bloom, bursts of bliss.

What need I more? O Death, the palm is thine.

Then welcome, Death! thy dreaded harbingers,

Age and disease; disease, though long my guest;

That plucks my nerves, those tender strings of life;

Which, pluck’d a little more, will toll the bell,490

That calls my few friends to my funeral;491

Where feeble nature drops, perhaps, a tear,

While reason and religion, better taught,

Congratulate the dead, and crown his tomb

With wreath triumphant. Death is victory;

It binds in chains the raging ills of life:

Lust and ambition, wrath and avarice,

Dragg’d at his chariot-wheel, applaud his power.

That ills corrosive, cares importunate,

Are not immortal too, O Death! is thine.500

Our day of dissolution!—name it right;

’Tis our great pay-day; ’tis our harvest, rich

And ripe: what though the sickle, sometimes keen,

Just scars us as we reap the golden grain?

More than thy balm, O Gilead! heals the wound.

Birth’s feeble cry, and death’s deep dismal groan,

Are slender tributes low-tax’d nature pays

For mighty gain: the gain of each, a life!

But O! the last the former so transcends,

Life dies, compared; life lives beyond the grave.510

And feel I, Death! no joy from thought of thee?

Death, the great counsellor, who man inspires

With every nobler thought, and fairer deed!

Death, the deliverer, who rescues man!

Death, the rewarder, who the rescued crowns!

Death, that absolves my birth; a curse without it!

Rich death, that realises all my cares,

Toils, virtues, hopes; without it a chimera!

Death, of all pain the period, not of joy;

Joy’s source, and subject, still subsist unhurt;520

One, in my soul; and one, in her great Sire;

Though the four winds were warring for my dust.

Yes, and from winds, and waves, and central night,

Though prison’d there, my dust too I reclaim

(To dust when drop proud nature’s proudest spheres),

And live entire. Death is the crown of life:526

Were death denied, poor man would live in vain;

Were death denied, to live would not be life;

Were death denied, even fools would wish to die.

Death wounds to cure: we fall; we rise; we reign!

Spring from our fetters; fasten in the skies;

Where blooming Eden withers in our sight:

Death gives us more than was in Eden lost.

This king of terrors is the prince of peace.

When shall I die to vanity, pain, death?

When shall I die?—When shall I live for ever?536

TO THEHONOURABLE MR YORKE.

NIGHT FOURTH.

A much-indebted muse, O Yorke! intrudes.Amid the smiles of fortune, and of youth,Thine ear is patient of a serious song.How deep implanted in the breast of manThe dread of death! I sing its sovereign cure.Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived,Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding manReceives, not suffers, Death’s tremendous blow.The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave;10The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm;These are the bugbears of a winter’s eve,The terrors of the living, not the dead.Imagination’s fool, and error’s wretch,Man makes a death, which nature never made;Then on the point of his own fancy falls;And feels a thousand deaths, in fearing one.But were death frightful, what has age to fear?If prudent, age should meet the friendly foe,And shelter in his hospitable gloom.20I scarce can meet a monument, but holdsMy younger; every date cries—“Come away.”And what recalls me? Look the world around,And tell me what: the wisest cannot tell.Should any born of woman give his thoughtFull range, on just dislike’s unbounded field;Of things, the vanity; of men, the flaws;Flaws in the best; the many, flaw all o’er;As leopards, spotted, or, as Ethiops, dark;Vivacious ill; good dying immature;30(How immature, Narcissa’s marble tells!)And at his death bequeathing endless pain;His heart, though bold, would sicken at the sight,And spend itself in sighs, for future scenes.But grant to life (and just it is to grantTo lucky life) some perquisites of joy;A time there is, when, like a thrice-told tale,Long-rifled life of sweet can yield no more,But from our comment on the comedy,Pleasing reflections on parts well sustain’d,40Or purposed emendations where we fail’d,Or hopes of plaudits from our candid Judge,When, on their exit, souls are bid unrobe,Toss fortune back her tinsel, and her plume,And drop this mask of flesh behind the scene.With me, that time is come; my world is dead;A new world rises, and new manners reign:Foreign comedians, a spruce band! arrive,To push me from the scene, or hiss me there.What a pert race starts up! the strangers gaze,50And I at them; my neighbour is unknown;Nor that the worst: ah me! the dire effectOf loitering here, of Death defrauded long;Of old so gracious (and let that suffice),54My very master knows me not.—Shall I dare say, peculiar is the fate?I’ve been so long remember’d, I’m forgot.An object ever pressing dims the sight,And hides behind its ardour to be seen.When in his courtiers’ ears I pour my plaint,60They drink it as the nectar of the great;And squeeze my hand, and beg me come to-morrow.Refusal! canst thou wear a smoother form?Indulge me, nor conceive I drop my theme:Who cheapens life, abates the fear of death:Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,Court favour, yet untaken, I besiege;Ambition’s ill-judged effort to be rich.Alas! ambition makes my little less;Embittering the possess’d: Why wish for more?70Wishing, of all employments, is the worst;Philosophy’s reverse; and health’s decay!Were I as plump as stall’d theology,Wishing would waste me to this shade again.Were I as wealthy as a South Sea dream,Wishing is an expedient to be poor.Wishing, that constant hectic of a fool;Caught at a court; purged off by purer air,And simpler diet; gifts of rural life!Bless’d be that hand divine, which gently laid80My heart at rest, beneath this humble shed.The world’s a stately bark, on dangerous seas,With pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril;Here, on a single plank, thrown safe ashore,I hear the tumult of the distant throng,As that of seas remote, or dying storms:And meditate on scenes, more silent still;Pursue my theme, and fight the fear of death.88Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut,Touching his reed, or leaning on his staff,Eager ambition’s fiery chace I see;I see the circling hunt, of noisy men,Burst law’s enclosure, leap the mounds of right,Pursuing, and pursued, each other’s prey;As wolves, for rapine; as the fox, for wiles;Till Death, that mighty hunter, earths them all.Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame?Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies:”And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.100If this song lives, posterity shall knowOne, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,Who thought even gold might come a day too late;Nor on his subtle death-bed plann’d his schemeFor future vacancies in Church or State;Some avocation deeming it—to die,Unbit by rage canine of dying rich;Guilt’s blunder! and the loudest laugh of hell.O my coevals! remnants of yourselves!Poor human ruins, tottering o’er the grave!110Shall we, shall aged men, like aged trees,Strike deeper their vile root, and closer cling,Still more enamour’d of this wretched soil?Shall our pale, wither’d hands, be still stretch’d out,Trembling, at once, with eagerness and age?With avarice, and convulsions, grasping hard?Grasping at air! for what has earth beside?Man wants but little; nor that little, long;How soon must he resign his very dust,Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!120Years unexperienced rush on numerous ills;And soon as man, expert from time, has found122The key of life, it opes the gates of death.When in this vale of years I backward look,And miss such numbers, numbers too of such,Firmer in health, and greener in their age,And stricter on their guard, and fitter farTo play life’s subtle game, I scarce believeI still survive: and am I fond of life,Who scarce can think it possible, I live?130Alive by miracle! or, what is next,Alive by Mead! if I am still alive,Who long have buried what gives life to live,Firmness of nerve, and energy of thought.Life’s lee is not more shallow, than impure,And vapid; sense and reason show the door,Call for my bier, and point me to the dust.O thou great arbiter of life and death!Nature’s immortal, immaterial Sun!Whose all-prolific beam late call’d me forth140From darkness, teeming darkness, where I layThe worm’s inferior, and, in rank, beneathThe dust I tread on, high to bear my brow,To drink the spirit of the golden day,And triumph in existence; and could knowNo motive, but my bliss; and hast ordain’dA rise in blessing! with the patriarch’s joy,Thy call I follow to the land unknown;I trust in thee, and know in whom I trust;Or life, or death, is equal; neither weighs:150All weight in this—O let me live to thee!Though nature’s terrors thus may be repress’d;Still frowns grim Death; guilt points the tyrant’s spear.And whence all human guilt? From death forgot.Ah me! too long I set at nought the swarmOf friendly warnings, which around me flew;156And smiled, unsmitten: small my cause to smile!Death’s admonitions, like shafts upwards shot,More dreadful by delay, the longer ereThey strike our hearts, the deeper is their wound;O think how deep, Lorenzo! here it stings:Who can appease its anguish? How it burns!162What hand the barb’d, envenom’d thought can draw?What healing hand can pour the balm of peace?And turn my sight undaunted on the tomb?With joy,—with grief, that healing hand I see;Ah! too conspicuous! it is fix’d on high.On high?—What means my phrensy? I blaspheme;Alas! how low! how far beneath the skies!The skies it form’d; and now it bleeds for me—170But bleeds the balm I want—yet still it bleeds;Draw the dire steel—ah, no! the dreadful blessingWhat heart or can sustain, or dares forego?There hangs all human hope: that nail supportsThe falling universe: that gone, we drop;Horror receives us, and the dismal wishCreation had been smother’d in her birth—Darkness his curtain, and his bed the dust;When stars and sun are dust beneath his throne!In heaven itself can such indulgence dwell?180Oh, what a groan was there! a groan not his.He seized our dreadful right; the load sustained;And heaved the mountain from a guilty world.A thousand worlds, so bought, were bought too dear;Sensations new in angels’ bosoms rise;Suspend their song; and make a pause in bliss.O for their song, to reach my lofty theme!Inspire me, Night! with all thy tuneful spheres;Whilst I with seraphs share seraphic themes,And show to men the dignity of man;190Lest I blaspheme my subject with my song.Shall Pagan pages glow celestial flame,And Christian languish? On our hearts, not heads,Falls the foul infamy: my heart! awake.What can awake thee, unawaked by this,“Expended deity on human weal?”Feel the great truths, which burst the tenfold nightOf heathen error, with a golden floodOf endless day: to feel, is to be fired;And to believe, Lorenzo! is to feel.200Thou most indulgent, most tremendous Power!Still more tremendous, for thy wondrous love!That arms, with awe more awful, thy commands;And foul transgression dips in sevenfold night;How our hearts tremble at thy love immense!In love immense, inviolably just!Thou, rather than thy justice should be stain’d,Didst stain the cross; and work of wonders farThe greatest, that thy dearest far might bleed.Bold thought! shall I dare speak it, or repress?210Should man more execrate, or boast, the guiltWhich roused such vengeance? which such love inflamed?O’er guilt (how mountainous!), with outstretch’d arms,Stern justice, and soft-smiling love embrace,Supporting, in full majesty, thy throne,When seem’d its majesty to need support,Or that, or man, inevitably lost:What, but the fathomless of thought divine,Could labour such expedient from despair,And rescue both? Both rescue! both exalt!220Oh, how are both exalted by the deed!The wondrous deed! or shall I call it more?A wonder in omnipotence itself!223A mystery no less to gods than men!Not, thus, our infidels th’ Eternal draw,A God all o’er, consummate, absolute,Full-orb’d, in his whole round of rays complete:They set at odds Heaven’s jarring attributes;And, with one excellence, another wound;Maim Heaven’s perfection, break its equal beams,Bid mercy triumph over—God himself,231Undeified by their opprobrious praise:A God all mercy, is a God unjust.Ye brainless wits! ye baptized infidels!Ye worse for mending! wash’d to fouler stains!The ransom was paid down; the fund of heaven,Heaven’s inexhaustible, exhausted fund,Amazing, and amazed, pour’d forth the price,All price beyond: though curious to compute,Archangels fail’d to cast the mighty sum:240Its value vast, ungrasp’d by minds create,For ever hides, and glows, in the Supreme.And was the ransom paid? It was: and paid(What can exalt the bounty more?) for you.The sun beheld it—No! the shocking scene,Drove back his chariot: midnight veil’d his face;Not such as this; not such as nature makes;A midnight nature shudder’d to behold;A midnight new! a dread eclipse (withoutOpposing spheres) from her Creator’s frown!250Sun! didst thou fly thy Maker’s pain? or startAt that enormous load of human guilt,Which bow’d His blessed head; o’erwhelm’d His cross;Made groan the centre; burst earth’s marble womb,With pangs, strange pangs! deliver’d of her dead?Hell howl’d; and heaven that hour let fall a tear;Heaven wept, that men might smile! Heaven bled, that manMight never die!——And is devotion virtue? ’Tis compell’d.259What heart of stone but glows at thoughts like these?Such contemplations mount us; and should mountThe mind still higher; nor ever glance on man,Unraptured, uninflamed.—Where roll my thoughtsTo rest from wonders? Other wonders rise;And strike where’er they roll: my soul is caught:Heaven’s sovereign blessings, clustering from the cross,Rush on her, in a throng, and close her round,The prisoner of amaze!—In his bless’d life,I see the path, and, in his death, the price,And in his great ascent, the proof supreme270Of immortality.—And did he rise?[14]Hear, O ye nations! hear it, O ye dead!He rose! he rose! he burst the bars of death.Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!And give the King of glory to come in.Who is the King of glory? He who leftHis throne of glory, for the pang of death:Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!And give the King of glory to come in.Who is the King of glory? He who slew280The ravenous foe, that gorged all human race!The King of glory, he whose glory fill’dHeaven with amazement at his love to man;And with divine complacency beheldPowers most illumined, wilder’d in the theme.The theme, the joy, how then shall man sustain?O the burst gates! crush’d sting! demolish’d throne!Last gasp of vanquish’d Death! Shout earth and heaven!This sum of good to man. Whose nature thenTook wing, and mounted with him from the tomb!290Then, then, I rose; then first humanity291Triumphant pass’d the crystal ports of light(Stupendous guest!), and seized eternal youth,Seized in our name. E’er since, ’tis blasphemousTo call man mortal. Man’s mortalityWas then transferr’d to death; and heaven’s durationUnalienably seal’d to this frail frame,This child of dust—Man, all-immortal! hail;Hail, Heaven! all lavish of strange gifts to man!Thine all the glory; man’s the boundless bliss.300Where am I rapt by this triumphant theme?On Christian joy’s exulting wing, aboveTh’ Aonian mount?—Alas! small cause for joy!What if to pain immortal? if extentOf being, to preclude a close of woe?Where, then, my boast of immortality?I boast it still, though cover’d o’er with guilt;For guilt, not innocence, his life he pour’d;’Tis guilt alone can justify his death;Nor that, unless his death can justify310Relenting guilt in Heaven’s indulgent sight.If, sick of folly, I relent; he writesMy name in heaven with that inverted spear(A spear deep-dipp’d in blood!) which pierced his side,And open’d there a font for all mankind,Who strive, who combat crimes, to drink, and live:This, only this, subdues the fear of death.And what is this?—Survey the wondrous cure:And at each step, let higher wonder rise!“Pardon for infinite offence! and pardon320Through means that speak its value infinite!A pardon bought with blood! with blood divine!With blood divine of Him I made my foe!Persisted to provoke! though woo’d and awed,Bless’d and chastised, a flagrant rebel still!325A rebel, ’midst the thunders of his throne!Nor I alone! a rebel universe!My species up in arms! not one exempt!Yet for the foulest of the foul, he dies,Most joy’d, for the redeem’d from deepest guilt!As if our race were held of highest rank;And Godhead dearer, as more kind to man!”332Bound, every heart! and every bosom, burn!O what a scale of miracles is here!Its lowest round, high planted on the skies;Its towering summit lost beyond the thoughtOf man or angel! O that I could climbThe wonderful ascent, with equal praise!Praise! flow for ever (if astonishmentWill give thee leave) my praise! for ever flow;340Praise ardent, cordial, constant, to high HeavenMore fragrant, than Arabia sacrificed,And all her spicy mountains in a flame.So dear, so due to Heaven, shall praise descend,With her soft plume (from plausive angel’s wingFirst pluck’d by man) to tickle mortal ears,Thus diving in the pockets of the great?Is praise the perquisite of every paw,Though black as hell, that grapples well for gold?O love of gold! thou meanest of amours!350Shall praise her odours waste on Virtue’s dead,Embalm the base, perfume the stench of guilt,Earn dirty bread by washing Æthiops fair,Removing filth, or sinking it from sight,A scavenger in scenes, where vacant posts,Like gibbets yet untenanted, expectTheir future ornaments? From courts and thrones,Return, apostate praise! thou vagabond!Thou prostitute! to thy first love return,395Thy first, thy greatest, once unrivall’d theme.There flow redundant; like Meander flow,Back to thy fountain; to that parent Power,Who gives the tongue to sound, the thought to soar,The soul to be. Men homage pay to men,Thoughtless beneath whose dreadful eye they bowIn mutual awe profound, of clay to clay,Of guilt to guilt; and turn their back on thee,Great Sire! whom thrones celestial ceaseless sing;To prostrate angels, an amazing scene!O the presumption of man’s awe for man!—370Man’s author! end! restorer! law! and judge!Thine, all; day thine, and thine this gloom of night,With all her wealth, with all her radiant worlds:What, night eternal, but a frown from thee?What, heaven’s meridian glory, but thy smile?And shall not praise be thine? not human praise?While heaven’s high host on hallelujahs live?O may I breathe no longer, than I breatheMy soul in praise to Him, who gave my soul,And all her infinite of prospect fair,380Cut through the shades of hell great Love! by theeO most adorable! most unadored!Where shall that praise begin, which ne’er should end?Where’er I turn, what claim on all applause!How is night’s sable mantle labour’d o’er,How richly wrought with attributes divine!What wisdom shines! what love! This midnight pomp,This gorgeous arch, with golden worlds inlaid!Built with divine ambition! nought to thee;For others this profusion: Thou, apart,390Above! beyond! O tell me, mighty Mind!Where art thou? Shall I dive into the deep,Call to the sun, or ask the roaring winds,393For their Creator? Shall I question loudThe thunder, if in that th’ Almighty dwells?Or holds He furious storms in straiten’d reins,And bids fierce whirlwinds wheel his rapid car?What mean these questions?—Trembling I retract;My prostrate soul adores the present God:Praise I a distant deity? He tunes400My voice (if tuned); the nerve, that writes, sustains:Wrapp’d in his being, I resound his praise:But though past all diffused, without a shore,His essence; local is his throne (as meet),To gather the dispersed (as standards callThe listed from afar): to fix a point,A central point, collective of his sons,Since finite every nature but his own.The nameless He, whose nod is nature’s birth;And nature’s shield, the shadow of his hand;410Her dissolution, his suspended smile!The great First-Last! pavilion’d high he sits,In darkness from excessive splendour borne,By gods unseen, unless through lustre lost.His glory, to created glory, bright,As that to central horrors; he looks downOn all that soars; and spans immensity.Though night unnumber’d worlds unfolds to view,Boundless creation! what art thou? A beam,A mere effluvium of his majesty:420And shall an atom of this atom-worldMutter, in dust and sin, the theme of heaven?Down to the centre should I send my thoughtThrough beds of glittering ore, and glowing gems,Their beggar’d blaze wants lustre for my lay;Goes out in darkness: if, on towering wing,I send it through the boundless vault of stars!427The stars, though rich, what dross their gold to thee,Great, good, wise, wonderful, eternal King!If to those conscious stars thy throne around,Praise ever-pouring, and imbibing bliss;And ask their strain; they want it, more they want,Poor their abundance, humble their sublime,433Languid their energy, their ardour cold,Indebted still, their highest rapture burns;Short of its mark, defective, though divine.Still more—this theme is man’s, and man’s alone;Their vast appointments reach it not: they seeOn earth a bounty not indulged on high;And downward look for heaven’s superior praise!440First-born of ether! high in fields of light!View man, to see the glory of your God!Could angels envy, they had envied here;And some did envy; and the rest, though gods,Yet still gods unredeem’d (their triumphs man,Tempted to weigh the dust against the skies),They less would feel, though more adorn, my theme.They sung creation (for in that they shared);How rose in melody, that child of love!Creation’s great superior, man! is thine;450Thine is redemption; they just gave the key:’Tis thine to raise, and eternize, the song;Though human, yet divine; for should not thisRaise man o’er man, and kindle seraphs here?Redemption! ’twas creation more sublime;Redemption! ’twas the labour of the skies;Far more than labour—it was death in heaven.A truth so strange! ’twere bold to think it true;If not far bolder still to disbelieve.459Here pause, and ponder—Was there death in heaven?What then on earth? on earth, which struck the blow?Who struck it? Who?—O how is man enlarged,462Seen through this medium! How the pigmy towers!How counterpoised his origin from dust!How counterpoised to dust his sad return!How voided his vast distance from the skies!How near he presses on the seraph’s wing!Which is the seraph? Which the born of clay?How this demonstrates, through the thickest cloudOf guilt, and clay condensed, the son of heaven!470The double son; the made, and the re-made!And shall heaven’s double property be lost?Man’s double madness only can destroy.To man the bleeding cross has promised all;The bleeding cross has sworn eternal grace;Who gave his life, what grace shall he deny?O ye who, from this Rock of Ages, leap,Apostates, plunging headlong in the deep!What cordial joy, what consolation strong,Whatever winds arise, or billows roll,480Our interest in the Master of the storm!Cling there, and in wreck’d nature’s ruins smile;While vile apostates tremble in a calm.Man! know thyself. All wisdom centres there;To none man seems ignoble, but to man;Angels that grandeur, men o’erlook, admire:How long shall human nature be their book,Degenerate mortal! and unread by thee?The beam dim reason sheds shows wonders there;What high contents! illustrious faculties!490But the grand comment, which displays at fullOur human height, scarce sever’d from divine,By heaven composed, was publish’d on the Cross.Who looks on that, and sees not in himselfAn awful stranger, a terrestrial god?495A glorious partner with the DeityIn that high attribute, immortal life?If a god bleeds, he bleeds not for a worm:I gaze, and, as I gaze, my mounting soulCatches strange fire, eternity! at thee;And drops the world—or rather, more enjoys:How changed the face of nature! how improved!502What seem’d a chaos, shines a glorious world,Or, what a world, an Eden; heighten’d all!It is another scene! another self!And still another, as time rolls along;And that a self far more illustrious still.Beyond long ages, yet roll’d up in shadesUnpierced by bold conjecture’s keenest ray,What evolutions of surprising fate!510How nature opens, and receives my soulIn boundless walks of raptured thought! where godsEncounter and embrace me! What new birthsOf strange adventure, foreign to the sun,Where what now charms, perhaps, whate’er exists,Old time, and fair creation, are forgot!Is this extravagant? Of man we formExtravagant conception, to be just:Conception unconfined wants wings to reach him:Beyond its reach, the Godhead only, more.520He, the great Father! kindled at one flameThe world of rationals; one spirit pour’dFrom spirit’s awful fountain; pour’d himselfThrough all their souls; but not in equal stream,Profuse, or frugal, of th’ inspiring God,As his wise plan demanded; and when pastTheir various trials, in their various spheres,If they continue rational, as made,Resorbs them all into himself again;529His throne their centre, and his smile their crown.Why doubt we, then, the glorious truth to sing,Though yet unsung, as deem’d, perhaps, too bold?Angels are men of a superior kind;Angels are men in lighter habit clad,High o’er celestial mountains wing’d in flight;And men are angels, loaded for an hour,Who wade this miry vale, and climb with pain,And slippery step, the bottom of the steep.Angels their failings, mortals have their praise;While here, of corps ethereal, such enroll’d,540And summon’d to the glorious standard soon,Which flames eternal crimson through the skies.Nor are our brothers thoughtless of their kin,Yet absent; but not absent from their love.Michael has fought our battles; Raphael sungOur triumphs; Gabriel on our errands flown,Sent by the Sovereign: and are these, O Man!Thy friends, thy warm allies? and thou (shame burnThe cheek to cinder!) rival to the brute?Religion’s all. Descending from the skies550To wretched man, the goddess, in her left,Holds out this world, and, in her right, the next;Religion! the sole voucher man is man;Supporter sole of man above himself;Even in this night of frailty, change, and death,She gives the soul a soul that acts a god.Religion! Providence! an After-state!Here is firm footing; here is solid rock!This can support us; all is sea besides;Sinks under us; bestorms, and then devours.560His hand the good man fastens on the skies,And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl.As when a wretch, from thick polluted air,563Darkness, and stench, and suffocating damps,And dungeon horrors, by kind fate, discharged,Climbs some fair eminence, where ether pureSurrounds him, and Elysian prospects rise,His heart exults, his spirits cast their load;As if new-born, he triumphs in the change;So joys the soul, when, from inglorious aims,And sordid sweets, from feculence and froth571Of ties terrestrial, set at large, she mountsTo reason’s region, her own element,Breathes hopes immortal, and affects the skies.Religion! thou the soul of happiness;And, groaning Calvary, of thee! there shineThe noblest truths; there strongest motives sting;There sacred violence assaults the soul;There, nothing but compulsion is forborne.Can love allure us? or can terror awe?580He weeps!—the falling drop puts out the sun;He sighs—the sigh earth’s deep foundation shakes.If in his love so terrible, what thenHis wrath inflamed? his tenderness on fire?Like soft, smooth oil, outblazing other fires?Can prayer, can praise avert it?—Thou, my all!My theme! my inspiration! and my crown!My strength in age! my rise in low estate!My soul’s ambition, pleasure, wealth!—my world!My light in darkness! and my life in death!590My boast through time! bliss through eternity!Eternity, too short to speak thy praise!Or fathom thy profound of love to man!To man of men the meanest, even to me;My sacrifice! my God!—what things are these!What then art Thou? by what name shall I call thee?—Knew I the name devout archangels use,597Devout archangels should the name enjoy,By me unrivall’d; thousands more sublime,None half so dear as that which, though unspoke,Still glows at heart: O how omnipotenceIs lost in love! Thou great Philanthropist!Father of angels! but the friend of man!603Like Jacob, fondest of the younger born!Thou, who didst save him, snatch the smoking brandFrom out the flames, and quench it in thy blood!How art thou pleased, by bounty to distress!To make us groan beneath our gratitude,Too big for birth! to favour, and confound;To challenge, and to distance all return!610Of lavish love stupendous heights to soar,And leave praise panting in the distant vale!Thy right, too great, defrauds thee of thy due;And sacrilegious our sublimest song.But since the naked will obtains thy smile,Beneath this monument of praise unpaid,And future life symphonious to my strain,(That noblest hymn to heaven!) for ever lieEntomb’d my fear of death! and every fear,The dread of every evil, but thy frown.620Whom see I yonder, so demurely smile?Laughter a labour, and might break their rest.Ye quietists, in homage to the skies!Serene! of soft address! who mildly makeAn unobtrusive tender of your hearts,Abhorring violence! who halt indeed;But, for the blessing, wrestle not with Heaven!Think you my song too turbulent? too warm?Are passions, then, the Pagans of the soul?Reason alone baptized? alone ordain’d630To touch things sacred? Oh for warmer still!631Guilt chills my zeal, and age benumbs my powers;Oh for an humbler heart, and prouder song!Thou, my much-injured theme! with that soft eye,Which melted o’er doom’d Salem, deign to lookCompassion to the coldness of my breast;And pardon to the winter in my strain.O ye cold-hearted, frozen, formalists!On such a theme, ’tis impious to be calm;Passion is reason, transport temper, here.640Shall Heaven, which gave us ardour, and has shownHer own for man so strongly, not disdainWhat smooth emollients in theology,Recumbent virtue’s downy doctors preach,That prose of piety, a lukewarm praise?Rise odours sweet from incense uninflamed?Devotion, when lukewarm, is undevout;But when it glows, its heat is struck to heaven;To human hearts her golden harps are strung;High heaven’s orchestra chants amen to man.650Hear I, or dream I hear, their distant strain,Sweet to the soul, and tasting strong of heaven,Soft-wafted on celestial pity’s plume,Through the vast spaces of the universe,To cheer me in this melancholy gloom?Oh, when will death (now stingless), like a friend,Admit me of their choir? Oh, when will deathThis mouldering, old, partition-wall throw down?Give beings, one in nature, one abode?O Death divine! that givest us to the skies!660Great future! glorious patron of the past,And present! when shall I thy shrine adore?From nature’s continent, immensely wide,Immensely bless’d, this little isle of life,This dark, incarcerating colony,665Divides us. Happy day! that breaks our chain;That manumits;[15]that calls from exile home;That leads to nature’s great metropolis,And re-admits us, through the guardian handOf elder brothers, to our Father’s throne;Who hears our Advocate, and, through his woundsBeholding man, allows that tender name.672’Tis this makes Christian triumph a command:’Tis this makes joy a duty to the wise;’Tis impious in a good man to be sad.See thou, Lorenzo! where hangs all our hope?Touch’d by the Cross, we live; or, more than die;That touch which touch’d not angels; more divineThan that which touch’d confusion into form,And darkness into glory; partial touch!680Ineffably pre-eminent regard!Sacred to man, and sovereign through the wholeLong golden chain of miracles, which hangsFrom heaven through all duration, and supportsIn one illustrious and amazing plan,Thy welfare, nature! and thy God’s renown.That touch, with charm celestial, heals the soulDiseased, drives pain from guilt, lights life in death,Turns earth to heaven, to heavenly thrones transformsThe ghastly ruins of the mouldering tomb.690Dost ask me when? When He who died returns;Returns, how changed! Where then the man of woe?In glory’s terrors all the Godhead burns;And all his courts, exhausted by the tideOf deities triumphant in his train,Leave a stupendous solitude in heaven;Replenish’d soon, replenish’d with increaseOf pomp, and multitude; a radiant band698Of angels new; of angels from the tomb.Is this by fancy thrown remote? and riseDark doubts between the promise and event?I send thee not to volumes for thy cure;Read nature; nature is a friend to truth;Nature is Christian; preaches to mankind;And bids dead matter aid us in our creed.Hast thou ne’er seen the comet’s flaming flight?Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror shedsOn gazing nations; from his fiery trainOf length enormous, takes his ample round709Through depths of ether; coasts unnumber’d worlds,Of more than solar glory; doubles wideHeaven’s mighty cape; and then revisits earth,From the long travel of a thousand years.Thus, at the destined period, shall returnHe, once on earth, who bids the comet blaze:And, with him, all our triumph o’er the tomb.Nature is dumb on this important point;Or hope precarious in low whisper breathes;Faith speaks aloud, distinct; even adders hear;But turn, and dart into the dark again.720Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death,To break the shock blind nature cannot shun,And lands thought smoothly on the farther shore.Death’s terror is the mountain faith removes;That mountain barrier between man and peace.’Tis faith disarms destruction; and absolvesFrom every clamorous charge, the guiltless tomb.Why disbelieve? Lorenzo!—“Reason bids,All-sacred reason.”—Hold her sacred still;Nor shalt thou want a rival in thy flame:730All-sacred reason! source, and soul, of allDemanding praise, on earth, or earth above!732My heart is thine: deep in its inmost folds,Live thou with life; live dearer of the two.Wear I the blessed cross, by fortune stamp’dOn passive nature, before thought was born?My birth’s blind bigot! fired with local zeal!No; reason re-baptized me when adult;Weigh’d true, and false, in her impartial scale;My heart became the convert of my head;740And made that choice, which once was but my fate.“On argument alone my faith is built:”Reason pursued is faith; and, unpursuedWhere proof invites, ’tis reason, then, no more:And such our proof, that, or our faith is right,Or reason lies, and Heaven design’d it wrong:Absolve we this? What, then, is blasphemy?Fond as we are, and justly fond, of faith,Reason, we grant, demands our first regard;The mother honour’d, as the daughter dear.750Reason the root, fair faith is but the flower;The fading flower shall die; but reason livesImmortal, as her Father in the skies.When faith is virtue, reason makes it so.Wrong not the Christian; think not reason yours:’Tis reason our great Master holds so dear;’Tis reason’s injured rights his wrath resents;’Tis reason’s voice obey’d his glories crown;To give lost reason life, he pour’d his own:Believe, and show the reason of a man;760Believe, and taste the pleasure of a God;Believe, and look with triumph on the tomb:Through reason’s wounds alone thy faith can die;Which dying, tenfold terror gives to death,And dips in venom his twice-mortal sting.Learn hence what honours, what loud pæans[16], due766To those, who push our antidote aside;Those boasted friends to reason, and to man,Whose fatal love stabs every joy, and leavesDeath’s terror heighten’d, gnawing on his heart.Those pompous sons of reason idolizedAnd vilified at once; of reason dead,Then deified, as monarchs were of old;773What conduct plants proud laurels on their brow?While love of truth through all their camp resounds,They draw pride’s curtain o’er the noontide ray,Spike up their inch of reason, on the pointOf philosophic wit, call’d argument;And then, exulting in their taper, cry,“Behold the sun!” and, Indian-like, adore.780Talk they of morals? O thou bleeding Love!Thou maker of new morals to mankind!The grand morality is love of thee.As wise as Socrates, if such they were(Nor will they bate of that sublime renown),As wise as Socrates, might justly standThe definition of a modern fool.A Christian is the highest style of man:And is there, who the blessed cross wipes off,As a foul blot from his dishonour’d brow?790If angels tremble, ’tis at such a sight:The wretch they quit, desponding of their charge,More struck with grief or wonder, who can tell?Ye sold to sense! ye citizens of earth!(For such alone the Christian banner fly)Know ye how wise your choice, how great your gain?Behold the picture of earth’s happiest man:“He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back,And says, he call’d another; that arrives,Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on;800Till one calls him, who varies not his call,But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound,Till nature dies, and judgment sets him free;A freedom far less welcome than his chain.”But grant man happy; grant him happy long;Add to life’s highest prize her latest hour;That hour, so late, is nimble in approach,That, like a post, comes on in full career:How swift the shuttle flies that weaves thy shroud!Where is the fable of thy former years?810Thrown down the gulf of time; as far from theeAs they had ne’er been thine; the day in hand,Like a bird struggling to get loose, is going;Scarce now possess’d, so suddenly ’tis gone;And each swift moment fled, is death advancedBy strides as swift. Eternity is all;And whose eternity? Who triumphs there?Bathing for ever in the font of bliss!For ever basking in the Deity!Lorenzo! who?—Thy conscience shall reply.820O give it leave to speak! ’twill speak ere long,Thy leave unask’d; Lorenzo! hear it now,While useful its advice, its accents mild.By the great edict, the divine decree,Truth is deposited with man’s last hour;An honest hour, and faithful to her trust;Truth, eldest daughter of the Deity;Truth, of his council, when he made the worlds;Nor less, when he shall judge the worlds he made;Though silent long, and sleeping ne’er so sound,830Smother’d with errors, and oppress’d with toys,That heaven-commission’d hour no sooner calls,But from her cavern in the soul’s abyss,Like him they fable under Ætna whelm’d,834The goddess bursts in thunder, and in flame;Loudly convinces, and severely pains.Dark demons I discharge, and hydra-stings;The keen vibration of bright truth—is hell:Just definition! though by schools untaught.Ye deaf to truth! peruse this parson’d page,840And trust, for once, a prophet, and a priest;“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”

A much-indebted muse, O Yorke! intrudes.

Amid the smiles of fortune, and of youth,

Thine ear is patient of a serious song.

How deep implanted in the breast of man

The dread of death! I sing its sovereign cure.

Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived,

Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.

Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding man

Receives, not suffers, Death’s tremendous blow.

The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave;10

The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm;

These are the bugbears of a winter’s eve,

The terrors of the living, not the dead.

Imagination’s fool, and error’s wretch,

Man makes a death, which nature never made;

Then on the point of his own fancy falls;

And feels a thousand deaths, in fearing one.

But were death frightful, what has age to fear?

If prudent, age should meet the friendly foe,

And shelter in his hospitable gloom.20

I scarce can meet a monument, but holds

My younger; every date cries—“Come away.”

And what recalls me? Look the world around,

And tell me what: the wisest cannot tell.

Should any born of woman give his thought

Full range, on just dislike’s unbounded field;

Of things, the vanity; of men, the flaws;

Flaws in the best; the many, flaw all o’er;

As leopards, spotted, or, as Ethiops, dark;

Vivacious ill; good dying immature;30

(How immature, Narcissa’s marble tells!)

And at his death bequeathing endless pain;

His heart, though bold, would sicken at the sight,

And spend itself in sighs, for future scenes.

But grant to life (and just it is to grant

To lucky life) some perquisites of joy;

A time there is, when, like a thrice-told tale,

Long-rifled life of sweet can yield no more,

But from our comment on the comedy,

Pleasing reflections on parts well sustain’d,40

Or purposed emendations where we fail’d,

Or hopes of plaudits from our candid Judge,

When, on their exit, souls are bid unrobe,

Toss fortune back her tinsel, and her plume,

And drop this mask of flesh behind the scene.

With me, that time is come; my world is dead;

A new world rises, and new manners reign:

Foreign comedians, a spruce band! arrive,

To push me from the scene, or hiss me there.

What a pert race starts up! the strangers gaze,50

And I at them; my neighbour is unknown;

Nor that the worst: ah me! the dire effect

Of loitering here, of Death defrauded long;

Of old so gracious (and let that suffice),54

My very master knows me not.—

Shall I dare say, peculiar is the fate?

I’ve been so long remember’d, I’m forgot.

An object ever pressing dims the sight,

And hides behind its ardour to be seen.

When in his courtiers’ ears I pour my plaint,60

They drink it as the nectar of the great;

And squeeze my hand, and beg me come to-morrow.

Refusal! canst thou wear a smoother form?

Indulge me, nor conceive I drop my theme:

Who cheapens life, abates the fear of death:

Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,

Court favour, yet untaken, I besiege;

Ambition’s ill-judged effort to be rich.

Alas! ambition makes my little less;

Embittering the possess’d: Why wish for more?70

Wishing, of all employments, is the worst;

Philosophy’s reverse; and health’s decay!

Were I as plump as stall’d theology,

Wishing would waste me to this shade again.

Were I as wealthy as a South Sea dream,

Wishing is an expedient to be poor.

Wishing, that constant hectic of a fool;

Caught at a court; purged off by purer air,

And simpler diet; gifts of rural life!

Bless’d be that hand divine, which gently laid80

My heart at rest, beneath this humble shed.

The world’s a stately bark, on dangerous seas,

With pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril;

Here, on a single plank, thrown safe ashore,

I hear the tumult of the distant throng,

As that of seas remote, or dying storms:

And meditate on scenes, more silent still;

Pursue my theme, and fight the fear of death.88

Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut,

Touching his reed, or leaning on his staff,

Eager ambition’s fiery chace I see;

I see the circling hunt, of noisy men,

Burst law’s enclosure, leap the mounds of right,

Pursuing, and pursued, each other’s prey;

As wolves, for rapine; as the fox, for wiles;

Till Death, that mighty hunter, earths them all.

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?

What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame?

Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies:”

And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.100

If this song lives, posterity shall know

One, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,

Who thought even gold might come a day too late;

Nor on his subtle death-bed plann’d his scheme

For future vacancies in Church or State;

Some avocation deeming it—to die,

Unbit by rage canine of dying rich;

Guilt’s blunder! and the loudest laugh of hell.

O my coevals! remnants of yourselves!

Poor human ruins, tottering o’er the grave!110

Shall we, shall aged men, like aged trees,

Strike deeper their vile root, and closer cling,

Still more enamour’d of this wretched soil?

Shall our pale, wither’d hands, be still stretch’d out,

Trembling, at once, with eagerness and age?

With avarice, and convulsions, grasping hard?

Grasping at air! for what has earth beside?

Man wants but little; nor that little, long;

How soon must he resign his very dust,

Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!120

Years unexperienced rush on numerous ills;

And soon as man, expert from time, has found122

The key of life, it opes the gates of death.

When in this vale of years I backward look,

And miss such numbers, numbers too of such,

Firmer in health, and greener in their age,

And stricter on their guard, and fitter far

To play life’s subtle game, I scarce believe

I still survive: and am I fond of life,

Who scarce can think it possible, I live?130

Alive by miracle! or, what is next,

Alive by Mead! if I am still alive,

Who long have buried what gives life to live,

Firmness of nerve, and energy of thought.

Life’s lee is not more shallow, than impure,

And vapid; sense and reason show the door,

Call for my bier, and point me to the dust.

O thou great arbiter of life and death!

Nature’s immortal, immaterial Sun!

Whose all-prolific beam late call’d me forth140

From darkness, teeming darkness, where I lay

The worm’s inferior, and, in rank, beneath

The dust I tread on, high to bear my brow,

To drink the spirit of the golden day,

And triumph in existence; and could know

No motive, but my bliss; and hast ordain’d

A rise in blessing! with the patriarch’s joy,

Thy call I follow to the land unknown;

I trust in thee, and know in whom I trust;

Or life, or death, is equal; neither weighs:150

All weight in this—O let me live to thee!

Though nature’s terrors thus may be repress’d;

Still frowns grim Death; guilt points the tyrant’s spear.

And whence all human guilt? From death forgot.

Ah me! too long I set at nought the swarm

Of friendly warnings, which around me flew;156

And smiled, unsmitten: small my cause to smile!

Death’s admonitions, like shafts upwards shot,

More dreadful by delay, the longer ere

They strike our hearts, the deeper is their wound;

O think how deep, Lorenzo! here it stings:

Who can appease its anguish? How it burns!162

What hand the barb’d, envenom’d thought can draw?

What healing hand can pour the balm of peace?

And turn my sight undaunted on the tomb?

With joy,—with grief, that healing hand I see;

Ah! too conspicuous! it is fix’d on high.

On high?—What means my phrensy? I blaspheme;

Alas! how low! how far beneath the skies!

The skies it form’d; and now it bleeds for me—170

But bleeds the balm I want—yet still it bleeds;

Draw the dire steel—ah, no! the dreadful blessing

What heart or can sustain, or dares forego?

There hangs all human hope: that nail supports

The falling universe: that gone, we drop;

Horror receives us, and the dismal wish

Creation had been smother’d in her birth—

Darkness his curtain, and his bed the dust;

When stars and sun are dust beneath his throne!

In heaven itself can such indulgence dwell?180

Oh, what a groan was there! a groan not his.

He seized our dreadful right; the load sustained;

And heaved the mountain from a guilty world.

A thousand worlds, so bought, were bought too dear;

Sensations new in angels’ bosoms rise;

Suspend their song; and make a pause in bliss.

O for their song, to reach my lofty theme!

Inspire me, Night! with all thy tuneful spheres;

Whilst I with seraphs share seraphic themes,

And show to men the dignity of man;190

Lest I blaspheme my subject with my song.

Shall Pagan pages glow celestial flame,

And Christian languish? On our hearts, not heads,

Falls the foul infamy: my heart! awake.

What can awake thee, unawaked by this,

“Expended deity on human weal?”

Feel the great truths, which burst the tenfold night

Of heathen error, with a golden flood

Of endless day: to feel, is to be fired;

And to believe, Lorenzo! is to feel.200

Thou most indulgent, most tremendous Power!

Still more tremendous, for thy wondrous love!

That arms, with awe more awful, thy commands;

And foul transgression dips in sevenfold night;

How our hearts tremble at thy love immense!

In love immense, inviolably just!

Thou, rather than thy justice should be stain’d,

Didst stain the cross; and work of wonders far

The greatest, that thy dearest far might bleed.

Bold thought! shall I dare speak it, or repress?210

Should man more execrate, or boast, the guilt

Which roused such vengeance? which such love inflamed?

O’er guilt (how mountainous!), with outstretch’d arms,

Stern justice, and soft-smiling love embrace,

Supporting, in full majesty, thy throne,

When seem’d its majesty to need support,

Or that, or man, inevitably lost:

What, but the fathomless of thought divine,

Could labour such expedient from despair,

And rescue both? Both rescue! both exalt!220

Oh, how are both exalted by the deed!

The wondrous deed! or shall I call it more?

A wonder in omnipotence itself!223

A mystery no less to gods than men!

Not, thus, our infidels th’ Eternal draw,

A God all o’er, consummate, absolute,

Full-orb’d, in his whole round of rays complete:

They set at odds Heaven’s jarring attributes;

And, with one excellence, another wound;

Maim Heaven’s perfection, break its equal beams,

Bid mercy triumph over—God himself,231

Undeified by their opprobrious praise:

A God all mercy, is a God unjust.

Ye brainless wits! ye baptized infidels!

Ye worse for mending! wash’d to fouler stains!

The ransom was paid down; the fund of heaven,

Heaven’s inexhaustible, exhausted fund,

Amazing, and amazed, pour’d forth the price,

All price beyond: though curious to compute,

Archangels fail’d to cast the mighty sum:240

Its value vast, ungrasp’d by minds create,

For ever hides, and glows, in the Supreme.

And was the ransom paid? It was: and paid

(What can exalt the bounty more?) for you.

The sun beheld it—No! the shocking scene,

Drove back his chariot: midnight veil’d his face;

Not such as this; not such as nature makes;

A midnight nature shudder’d to behold;

A midnight new! a dread eclipse (without

Opposing spheres) from her Creator’s frown!250

Sun! didst thou fly thy Maker’s pain? or start

At that enormous load of human guilt,

Which bow’d His blessed head; o’erwhelm’d His cross;

Made groan the centre; burst earth’s marble womb,

With pangs, strange pangs! deliver’d of her dead?

Hell howl’d; and heaven that hour let fall a tear;

Heaven wept, that men might smile! Heaven bled, that man

Might never die!——

And is devotion virtue? ’Tis compell’d.259

What heart of stone but glows at thoughts like these?

Such contemplations mount us; and should mount

The mind still higher; nor ever glance on man,

Unraptured, uninflamed.—Where roll my thoughts

To rest from wonders? Other wonders rise;

And strike where’er they roll: my soul is caught:

Heaven’s sovereign blessings, clustering from the cross,

Rush on her, in a throng, and close her round,

The prisoner of amaze!—In his bless’d life,

I see the path, and, in his death, the price,

And in his great ascent, the proof supreme270

Of immortality.—And did he rise?[14]

Hear, O ye nations! hear it, O ye dead!

He rose! he rose! he burst the bars of death.

Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!

And give the King of glory to come in.

Who is the King of glory? He who left

His throne of glory, for the pang of death:

Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates!

And give the King of glory to come in.

Who is the King of glory? He who slew280

The ravenous foe, that gorged all human race!

The King of glory, he whose glory fill’d

Heaven with amazement at his love to man;

And with divine complacency beheld

Powers most illumined, wilder’d in the theme.

The theme, the joy, how then shall man sustain?

O the burst gates! crush’d sting! demolish’d throne!

Last gasp of vanquish’d Death! Shout earth and heaven!

This sum of good to man. Whose nature then

Took wing, and mounted with him from the tomb!290

Then, then, I rose; then first humanity291

Triumphant pass’d the crystal ports of light

(Stupendous guest!), and seized eternal youth,

Seized in our name. E’er since, ’tis blasphemous

To call man mortal. Man’s mortality

Was then transferr’d to death; and heaven’s duration

Unalienably seal’d to this frail frame,

This child of dust—Man, all-immortal! hail;

Hail, Heaven! all lavish of strange gifts to man!

Thine all the glory; man’s the boundless bliss.300

Where am I rapt by this triumphant theme?

On Christian joy’s exulting wing, above

Th’ Aonian mount?—Alas! small cause for joy!

What if to pain immortal? if extent

Of being, to preclude a close of woe?

Where, then, my boast of immortality?

I boast it still, though cover’d o’er with guilt;

For guilt, not innocence, his life he pour’d;

’Tis guilt alone can justify his death;

Nor that, unless his death can justify310

Relenting guilt in Heaven’s indulgent sight.

If, sick of folly, I relent; he writes

My name in heaven with that inverted spear

(A spear deep-dipp’d in blood!) which pierced his side,

And open’d there a font for all mankind,

Who strive, who combat crimes, to drink, and live:

This, only this, subdues the fear of death.

And what is this?—Survey the wondrous cure:

And at each step, let higher wonder rise!

“Pardon for infinite offence! and pardon320

Through means that speak its value infinite!

A pardon bought with blood! with blood divine!

With blood divine of Him I made my foe!

Persisted to provoke! though woo’d and awed,

Bless’d and chastised, a flagrant rebel still!325

A rebel, ’midst the thunders of his throne!

Nor I alone! a rebel universe!

My species up in arms! not one exempt!

Yet for the foulest of the foul, he dies,

Most joy’d, for the redeem’d from deepest guilt!

As if our race were held of highest rank;

And Godhead dearer, as more kind to man!”332

Bound, every heart! and every bosom, burn!

O what a scale of miracles is here!

Its lowest round, high planted on the skies;

Its towering summit lost beyond the thought

Of man or angel! O that I could climb

The wonderful ascent, with equal praise!

Praise! flow for ever (if astonishment

Will give thee leave) my praise! for ever flow;340

Praise ardent, cordial, constant, to high Heaven

More fragrant, than Arabia sacrificed,

And all her spicy mountains in a flame.

So dear, so due to Heaven, shall praise descend,

With her soft plume (from plausive angel’s wing

First pluck’d by man) to tickle mortal ears,

Thus diving in the pockets of the great?

Is praise the perquisite of every paw,

Though black as hell, that grapples well for gold?

O love of gold! thou meanest of amours!350

Shall praise her odours waste on Virtue’s dead,

Embalm the base, perfume the stench of guilt,

Earn dirty bread by washing Æthiops fair,

Removing filth, or sinking it from sight,

A scavenger in scenes, where vacant posts,

Like gibbets yet untenanted, expect

Their future ornaments? From courts and thrones,

Return, apostate praise! thou vagabond!

Thou prostitute! to thy first love return,395

Thy first, thy greatest, once unrivall’d theme.

There flow redundant; like Meander flow,

Back to thy fountain; to that parent Power,

Who gives the tongue to sound, the thought to soar,

The soul to be. Men homage pay to men,

Thoughtless beneath whose dreadful eye they bow

In mutual awe profound, of clay to clay,

Of guilt to guilt; and turn their back on thee,

Great Sire! whom thrones celestial ceaseless sing;

To prostrate angels, an amazing scene!

O the presumption of man’s awe for man!—370

Man’s author! end! restorer! law! and judge!

Thine, all; day thine, and thine this gloom of night,

With all her wealth, with all her radiant worlds:

What, night eternal, but a frown from thee?

What, heaven’s meridian glory, but thy smile?

And shall not praise be thine? not human praise?

While heaven’s high host on hallelujahs live?

O may I breathe no longer, than I breathe

My soul in praise to Him, who gave my soul,

And all her infinite of prospect fair,380

Cut through the shades of hell great Love! by thee

O most adorable! most unadored!

Where shall that praise begin, which ne’er should end?

Where’er I turn, what claim on all applause!

How is night’s sable mantle labour’d o’er,

How richly wrought with attributes divine!

What wisdom shines! what love! This midnight pomp,

This gorgeous arch, with golden worlds inlaid!

Built with divine ambition! nought to thee;

For others this profusion: Thou, apart,390

Above! beyond! O tell me, mighty Mind!

Where art thou? Shall I dive into the deep,

Call to the sun, or ask the roaring winds,393

For their Creator? Shall I question loud

The thunder, if in that th’ Almighty dwells?

Or holds He furious storms in straiten’d reins,

And bids fierce whirlwinds wheel his rapid car?

What mean these questions?—Trembling I retract;

My prostrate soul adores the present God:

Praise I a distant deity? He tunes400

My voice (if tuned); the nerve, that writes, sustains:

Wrapp’d in his being, I resound his praise:

But though past all diffused, without a shore,

His essence; local is his throne (as meet),

To gather the dispersed (as standards call

The listed from afar): to fix a point,

A central point, collective of his sons,

Since finite every nature but his own.

The nameless He, whose nod is nature’s birth;

And nature’s shield, the shadow of his hand;410

Her dissolution, his suspended smile!

The great First-Last! pavilion’d high he sits,

In darkness from excessive splendour borne,

By gods unseen, unless through lustre lost.

His glory, to created glory, bright,

As that to central horrors; he looks down

On all that soars; and spans immensity.

Though night unnumber’d worlds unfolds to view,

Boundless creation! what art thou? A beam,

A mere effluvium of his majesty:420

And shall an atom of this atom-world

Mutter, in dust and sin, the theme of heaven?

Down to the centre should I send my thought

Through beds of glittering ore, and glowing gems,

Their beggar’d blaze wants lustre for my lay;

Goes out in darkness: if, on towering wing,

I send it through the boundless vault of stars!427

The stars, though rich, what dross their gold to thee,

Great, good, wise, wonderful, eternal King!

If to those conscious stars thy throne around,

Praise ever-pouring, and imbibing bliss;

And ask their strain; they want it, more they want,

Poor their abundance, humble their sublime,433

Languid their energy, their ardour cold,

Indebted still, their highest rapture burns;

Short of its mark, defective, though divine.

Still more—this theme is man’s, and man’s alone;

Their vast appointments reach it not: they see

On earth a bounty not indulged on high;

And downward look for heaven’s superior praise!440

First-born of ether! high in fields of light!

View man, to see the glory of your God!

Could angels envy, they had envied here;

And some did envy; and the rest, though gods,

Yet still gods unredeem’d (their triumphs man,

Tempted to weigh the dust against the skies),

They less would feel, though more adorn, my theme.

They sung creation (for in that they shared);

How rose in melody, that child of love!

Creation’s great superior, man! is thine;450

Thine is redemption; they just gave the key:

’Tis thine to raise, and eternize, the song;

Though human, yet divine; for should not this

Raise man o’er man, and kindle seraphs here?

Redemption! ’twas creation more sublime;

Redemption! ’twas the labour of the skies;

Far more than labour—it was death in heaven.

A truth so strange! ’twere bold to think it true;

If not far bolder still to disbelieve.459

Here pause, and ponder—Was there death in heaven?

What then on earth? on earth, which struck the blow?

Who struck it? Who?—O how is man enlarged,462

Seen through this medium! How the pigmy towers!

How counterpoised his origin from dust!

How counterpoised to dust his sad return!

How voided his vast distance from the skies!

How near he presses on the seraph’s wing!

Which is the seraph? Which the born of clay?

How this demonstrates, through the thickest cloud

Of guilt, and clay condensed, the son of heaven!470

The double son; the made, and the re-made!

And shall heaven’s double property be lost?

Man’s double madness only can destroy.

To man the bleeding cross has promised all;

The bleeding cross has sworn eternal grace;

Who gave his life, what grace shall he deny?

O ye who, from this Rock of Ages, leap,

Apostates, plunging headlong in the deep!

What cordial joy, what consolation strong,

Whatever winds arise, or billows roll,480

Our interest in the Master of the storm!

Cling there, and in wreck’d nature’s ruins smile;

While vile apostates tremble in a calm.

Man! know thyself. All wisdom centres there;

To none man seems ignoble, but to man;

Angels that grandeur, men o’erlook, admire:

How long shall human nature be their book,

Degenerate mortal! and unread by thee?

The beam dim reason sheds shows wonders there;

What high contents! illustrious faculties!490

But the grand comment, which displays at full

Our human height, scarce sever’d from divine,

By heaven composed, was publish’d on the Cross.

Who looks on that, and sees not in himself

An awful stranger, a terrestrial god?495

A glorious partner with the Deity

In that high attribute, immortal life?

If a god bleeds, he bleeds not for a worm:

I gaze, and, as I gaze, my mounting soul

Catches strange fire, eternity! at thee;

And drops the world—or rather, more enjoys:

How changed the face of nature! how improved!502

What seem’d a chaos, shines a glorious world,

Or, what a world, an Eden; heighten’d all!

It is another scene! another self!

And still another, as time rolls along;

And that a self far more illustrious still.

Beyond long ages, yet roll’d up in shades

Unpierced by bold conjecture’s keenest ray,

What evolutions of surprising fate!510

How nature opens, and receives my soul

In boundless walks of raptured thought! where gods

Encounter and embrace me! What new births

Of strange adventure, foreign to the sun,

Where what now charms, perhaps, whate’er exists,

Old time, and fair creation, are forgot!

Is this extravagant? Of man we form

Extravagant conception, to be just:

Conception unconfined wants wings to reach him:

Beyond its reach, the Godhead only, more.520

He, the great Father! kindled at one flame

The world of rationals; one spirit pour’d

From spirit’s awful fountain; pour’d himself

Through all their souls; but not in equal stream,

Profuse, or frugal, of th’ inspiring God,

As his wise plan demanded; and when past

Their various trials, in their various spheres,

If they continue rational, as made,

Resorbs them all into himself again;529

His throne their centre, and his smile their crown.

Why doubt we, then, the glorious truth to sing,

Though yet unsung, as deem’d, perhaps, too bold?

Angels are men of a superior kind;

Angels are men in lighter habit clad,

High o’er celestial mountains wing’d in flight;

And men are angels, loaded for an hour,

Who wade this miry vale, and climb with pain,

And slippery step, the bottom of the steep.

Angels their failings, mortals have their praise;

While here, of corps ethereal, such enroll’d,540

And summon’d to the glorious standard soon,

Which flames eternal crimson through the skies.

Nor are our brothers thoughtless of their kin,

Yet absent; but not absent from their love.

Michael has fought our battles; Raphael sung

Our triumphs; Gabriel on our errands flown,

Sent by the Sovereign: and are these, O Man!

Thy friends, thy warm allies? and thou (shame burn

The cheek to cinder!) rival to the brute?

Religion’s all. Descending from the skies550

To wretched man, the goddess, in her left,

Holds out this world, and, in her right, the next;

Religion! the sole voucher man is man;

Supporter sole of man above himself;

Even in this night of frailty, change, and death,

She gives the soul a soul that acts a god.

Religion! Providence! an After-state!

Here is firm footing; here is solid rock!

This can support us; all is sea besides;

Sinks under us; bestorms, and then devours.560

His hand the good man fastens on the skies,

And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl.

As when a wretch, from thick polluted air,563

Darkness, and stench, and suffocating damps,

And dungeon horrors, by kind fate, discharged,

Climbs some fair eminence, where ether pure

Surrounds him, and Elysian prospects rise,

His heart exults, his spirits cast their load;

As if new-born, he triumphs in the change;

So joys the soul, when, from inglorious aims,

And sordid sweets, from feculence and froth571

Of ties terrestrial, set at large, she mounts

To reason’s region, her own element,

Breathes hopes immortal, and affects the skies.

Religion! thou the soul of happiness;

And, groaning Calvary, of thee! there shine

The noblest truths; there strongest motives sting;

There sacred violence assaults the soul;

There, nothing but compulsion is forborne.

Can love allure us? or can terror awe?580

He weeps!—the falling drop puts out the sun;

He sighs—the sigh earth’s deep foundation shakes.

If in his love so terrible, what then

His wrath inflamed? his tenderness on fire?

Like soft, smooth oil, outblazing other fires?

Can prayer, can praise avert it?—Thou, my all!

My theme! my inspiration! and my crown!

My strength in age! my rise in low estate!

My soul’s ambition, pleasure, wealth!—my world!

My light in darkness! and my life in death!590

My boast through time! bliss through eternity!

Eternity, too short to speak thy praise!

Or fathom thy profound of love to man!

To man of men the meanest, even to me;

My sacrifice! my God!—what things are these!

What then art Thou? by what name shall I call thee?—

Knew I the name devout archangels use,597

Devout archangels should the name enjoy,

By me unrivall’d; thousands more sublime,

None half so dear as that which, though unspoke,

Still glows at heart: O how omnipotence

Is lost in love! Thou great Philanthropist!

Father of angels! but the friend of man!603

Like Jacob, fondest of the younger born!

Thou, who didst save him, snatch the smoking brand

From out the flames, and quench it in thy blood!

How art thou pleased, by bounty to distress!

To make us groan beneath our gratitude,

Too big for birth! to favour, and confound;

To challenge, and to distance all return!610

Of lavish love stupendous heights to soar,

And leave praise panting in the distant vale!

Thy right, too great, defrauds thee of thy due;

And sacrilegious our sublimest song.

But since the naked will obtains thy smile,

Beneath this monument of praise unpaid,

And future life symphonious to my strain,

(That noblest hymn to heaven!) for ever lie

Entomb’d my fear of death! and every fear,

The dread of every evil, but thy frown.620

Whom see I yonder, so demurely smile?

Laughter a labour, and might break their rest.

Ye quietists, in homage to the skies!

Serene! of soft address! who mildly make

An unobtrusive tender of your hearts,

Abhorring violence! who halt indeed;

But, for the blessing, wrestle not with Heaven!

Think you my song too turbulent? too warm?

Are passions, then, the Pagans of the soul?

Reason alone baptized? alone ordain’d630

To touch things sacred? Oh for warmer still!631

Guilt chills my zeal, and age benumbs my powers;

Oh for an humbler heart, and prouder song!

Thou, my much-injured theme! with that soft eye,

Which melted o’er doom’d Salem, deign to look

Compassion to the coldness of my breast;

And pardon to the winter in my strain.

O ye cold-hearted, frozen, formalists!

On such a theme, ’tis impious to be calm;

Passion is reason, transport temper, here.640

Shall Heaven, which gave us ardour, and has shown

Her own for man so strongly, not disdain

What smooth emollients in theology,

Recumbent virtue’s downy doctors preach,

That prose of piety, a lukewarm praise?

Rise odours sweet from incense uninflamed?

Devotion, when lukewarm, is undevout;

But when it glows, its heat is struck to heaven;

To human hearts her golden harps are strung;

High heaven’s orchestra chants amen to man.650

Hear I, or dream I hear, their distant strain,

Sweet to the soul, and tasting strong of heaven,

Soft-wafted on celestial pity’s plume,

Through the vast spaces of the universe,

To cheer me in this melancholy gloom?

Oh, when will death (now stingless), like a friend,

Admit me of their choir? Oh, when will death

This mouldering, old, partition-wall throw down?

Give beings, one in nature, one abode?

O Death divine! that givest us to the skies!660

Great future! glorious patron of the past,

And present! when shall I thy shrine adore?

From nature’s continent, immensely wide,

Immensely bless’d, this little isle of life,

This dark, incarcerating colony,665

Divides us. Happy day! that breaks our chain;

That manumits;[15]that calls from exile home;

That leads to nature’s great metropolis,

And re-admits us, through the guardian hand

Of elder brothers, to our Father’s throne;

Who hears our Advocate, and, through his wounds

Beholding man, allows that tender name.672

’Tis this makes Christian triumph a command:

’Tis this makes joy a duty to the wise;

’Tis impious in a good man to be sad.

See thou, Lorenzo! where hangs all our hope?

Touch’d by the Cross, we live; or, more than die;

That touch which touch’d not angels; more divine

Than that which touch’d confusion into form,

And darkness into glory; partial touch!680

Ineffably pre-eminent regard!

Sacred to man, and sovereign through the whole

Long golden chain of miracles, which hangs

From heaven through all duration, and supports

In one illustrious and amazing plan,

Thy welfare, nature! and thy God’s renown.

That touch, with charm celestial, heals the soul

Diseased, drives pain from guilt, lights life in death,

Turns earth to heaven, to heavenly thrones transforms

The ghastly ruins of the mouldering tomb.690

Dost ask me when? When He who died returns;

Returns, how changed! Where then the man of woe?

In glory’s terrors all the Godhead burns;

And all his courts, exhausted by the tide

Of deities triumphant in his train,

Leave a stupendous solitude in heaven;

Replenish’d soon, replenish’d with increase

Of pomp, and multitude; a radiant band698

Of angels new; of angels from the tomb.

Is this by fancy thrown remote? and rise

Dark doubts between the promise and event?

I send thee not to volumes for thy cure;

Read nature; nature is a friend to truth;

Nature is Christian; preaches to mankind;

And bids dead matter aid us in our creed.

Hast thou ne’er seen the comet’s flaming flight?

Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror sheds

On gazing nations; from his fiery train

Of length enormous, takes his ample round709

Through depths of ether; coasts unnumber’d worlds,

Of more than solar glory; doubles wide

Heaven’s mighty cape; and then revisits earth,

From the long travel of a thousand years.

Thus, at the destined period, shall return

He, once on earth, who bids the comet blaze:

And, with him, all our triumph o’er the tomb.

Nature is dumb on this important point;

Or hope precarious in low whisper breathes;

Faith speaks aloud, distinct; even adders hear;

But turn, and dart into the dark again.720

Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death,

To break the shock blind nature cannot shun,

And lands thought smoothly on the farther shore.

Death’s terror is the mountain faith removes;

That mountain barrier between man and peace.

’Tis faith disarms destruction; and absolves

From every clamorous charge, the guiltless tomb.

Why disbelieve? Lorenzo!—“Reason bids,

All-sacred reason.”—Hold her sacred still;

Nor shalt thou want a rival in thy flame:730

All-sacred reason! source, and soul, of all

Demanding praise, on earth, or earth above!732

My heart is thine: deep in its inmost folds,

Live thou with life; live dearer of the two.

Wear I the blessed cross, by fortune stamp’d

On passive nature, before thought was born?

My birth’s blind bigot! fired with local zeal!

No; reason re-baptized me when adult;

Weigh’d true, and false, in her impartial scale;

My heart became the convert of my head;740

And made that choice, which once was but my fate.

“On argument alone my faith is built:”

Reason pursued is faith; and, unpursued

Where proof invites, ’tis reason, then, no more:

And such our proof, that, or our faith is right,

Or reason lies, and Heaven design’d it wrong:

Absolve we this? What, then, is blasphemy?

Fond as we are, and justly fond, of faith,

Reason, we grant, demands our first regard;

The mother honour’d, as the daughter dear.750

Reason the root, fair faith is but the flower;

The fading flower shall die; but reason lives

Immortal, as her Father in the skies.

When faith is virtue, reason makes it so.

Wrong not the Christian; think not reason yours:

’Tis reason our great Master holds so dear;

’Tis reason’s injured rights his wrath resents;

’Tis reason’s voice obey’d his glories crown;

To give lost reason life, he pour’d his own:

Believe, and show the reason of a man;760

Believe, and taste the pleasure of a God;

Believe, and look with triumph on the tomb:

Through reason’s wounds alone thy faith can die;

Which dying, tenfold terror gives to death,

And dips in venom his twice-mortal sting.

Learn hence what honours, what loud pæans[16], due766

To those, who push our antidote aside;

Those boasted friends to reason, and to man,

Whose fatal love stabs every joy, and leaves

Death’s terror heighten’d, gnawing on his heart.

Those pompous sons of reason idolized

And vilified at once; of reason dead,

Then deified, as monarchs were of old;773

What conduct plants proud laurels on their brow?

While love of truth through all their camp resounds,

They draw pride’s curtain o’er the noontide ray,

Spike up their inch of reason, on the point

Of philosophic wit, call’d argument;

And then, exulting in their taper, cry,

“Behold the sun!” and, Indian-like, adore.780

Talk they of morals? O thou bleeding Love!

Thou maker of new morals to mankind!

The grand morality is love of thee.

As wise as Socrates, if such they were

(Nor will they bate of that sublime renown),

As wise as Socrates, might justly stand

The definition of a modern fool.

A Christian is the highest style of man:

And is there, who the blessed cross wipes off,

As a foul blot from his dishonour’d brow?790

If angels tremble, ’tis at such a sight:

The wretch they quit, desponding of their charge,

More struck with grief or wonder, who can tell?

Ye sold to sense! ye citizens of earth!

(For such alone the Christian banner fly)

Know ye how wise your choice, how great your gain?

Behold the picture of earth’s happiest man:

“He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back,

And says, he call’d another; that arrives,

Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on;800

Till one calls him, who varies not his call,

But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound,

Till nature dies, and judgment sets him free;

A freedom far less welcome than his chain.”

But grant man happy; grant him happy long;

Add to life’s highest prize her latest hour;

That hour, so late, is nimble in approach,

That, like a post, comes on in full career:

How swift the shuttle flies that weaves thy shroud!

Where is the fable of thy former years?810

Thrown down the gulf of time; as far from thee

As they had ne’er been thine; the day in hand,

Like a bird struggling to get loose, is going;

Scarce now possess’d, so suddenly ’tis gone;

And each swift moment fled, is death advanced

By strides as swift. Eternity is all;

And whose eternity? Who triumphs there?

Bathing for ever in the font of bliss!

For ever basking in the Deity!

Lorenzo! who?—Thy conscience shall reply.820

O give it leave to speak! ’twill speak ere long,

Thy leave unask’d; Lorenzo! hear it now,

While useful its advice, its accents mild.

By the great edict, the divine decree,

Truth is deposited with man’s last hour;

An honest hour, and faithful to her trust;

Truth, eldest daughter of the Deity;

Truth, of his council, when he made the worlds;

Nor less, when he shall judge the worlds he made;

Though silent long, and sleeping ne’er so sound,830

Smother’d with errors, and oppress’d with toys,

That heaven-commission’d hour no sooner calls,

But from her cavern in the soul’s abyss,

Like him they fable under Ætna whelm’d,834

The goddess bursts in thunder, and in flame;

Loudly convinces, and severely pains.

Dark demons I discharge, and hydra-stings;

The keen vibration of bright truth—is hell:

Just definition! though by schools untaught.

Ye deaf to truth! peruse this parson’d page,840

And trust, for once, a prophet, and a priest;

“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”

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