Imatges de pàgina
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And seems to creep decrepit with his age.
Behold him when passed by; what then is seen,
But his broad pinions swifter than the winds!
All mankind in contradiction strong,
Rueful, aghast cry out on his career.

MAN'S IMMORTALITY PROVED BY REFERENCE TO NATURE.

NATURE, thy daughter, ever changing birth,
Of Thee, the great immutable, to man
Speaks wisdom; is his oracle supreme;
And he who most consults her is most wise.
Look nature through, 'tis revolution all;

All change, no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise, and set, and rise:
Earth takes th' example. See the summer gay,
With her green chaplet, and ambrosial flowers,
Droops into pallid autumn; winter gray,
Horrid with frost, and turbulent with storm,
Blows autuan and his golden fruits away,

Then melts into the spring; soft spring, with breath
Favonian from warm chambers of the south,

Recalls the first. All to reflourish fades;

As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend:
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.

With this minute description, emblem just,
Nature revolves, but man advances! both
Eternal; that a circle, this a line;

That gravitates, this soars. Th' aspiring soul,
Ardent and tremulous, like flame ascends:
Zeal and humility, her wings to heaven.
The world of matter, with its various forms,
All dies into new life. Life born from death,
Rolls the vast mass, and shall forever roll:
No single atom, once in being, lost,

With change of counsel charges the most High.

Matter immortal! And shall spirit die?

Above the noblest shall less noble rise?

Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man! be sown in barren ground,
Less privileged than grain on which he feeds?
Is man, in whom alone is power to prize
The bliss of being, or with previous pain
Deplore its period, by the spleen of fate
Severely doomed death's single unredeemed?

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COULDST thou persuade me the next life would fail
Our ardent wishes, how should I pour out
My bleeding heart in anguish, new, as deep!
Oh! with what thoughts, thy hope and my despair,
Abhorred Annihilation blasts the soul,
And wide extends the bounds of human wo!
In this black channel would my ravings run:
Grief from the future borrowed peace erewhile
The future vanished, and the present pained:

Fall how profound! Hurled headlong, hurled at once
To night! to nothing! darker still than night.
If 'twas a dream, why wake me, my worst foe?
Oh! for delusion! Oh! for error still!
Could vengeance strike much stronger than to plant
A thinking being in a world like this,
Not over rich before, now beggared quite,

More cursed than at the fall? The sun goes out!
The thorns shoot up! what thorns in every thought!
Why sense of better? it embitters worse:
Why sense? why life? if but to sigh, then sink
To what I was? twice nothing! and much wo!
Wo from heaven's bounties! wo from what was wont

To flatter most, high intellectual powers.
Thought, virtue, knowledge! blessings by thy scheme
All poisoned into pains. First, knowledge, once
My soul's ambition, now her greatest dread.
To know myself true wisdom?-no, to shun

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That shocking science, parent of despair!
Avert thy mirror; if I see, I die.

Know my Creator? climb his blest abode,
By painful speculation pierce the veil,
Dive in his nature, read his attributes,
in admiration on a foe

And gaze

Obtruding life, withholding happiness?
From the full rivers that surround his throne
Nor letting fall one drop of joy on man;
Man gasping for one drop, that he might cease
To curse his birth, nor envy reptiles more!
Ye sable clouds! ye darkest shades of night,
Hide Him, forever hide Him, from my thought,
Once all my comfort; source and soul of joy!
Know his achievements! study his renown!
Contemplate this amazing universe,

Dropped from his hand with miracles replete !—
For what? 'mid miracles of nobler name
To find one miracle of misery!

To find the being which alone can know

And praise his works, a blemish on his praise?
Through Nature's ample range in thought to stray,
And start at man, the single mourner there,
Breathing high hope chained down to pangs and death.
Knowing is suffering, and shall virtue share
The sigh of knowledge? Virtue shares the sigh
By straining up the steep of excellent;

By battles fought, and from temptation won,
What gains she but the pang of seeing worth,
Angelic worth, soon shuffled in the dark
With every vice, and swept to brutal dust?

NO SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE ANNIHILATED.

THINK'ST thou Omnipotence a naked root,
Each blossom fair of Deity destroyed?
Nothing is dead; nay, nothing sleeps; each soul

That ever animated human clay

Now wakes; is on the wing; and when the call

Of that loud trump collects us round heaven's throne
Conglobed, we bask in everlasting day.

How bright this prospect shines! how gloomy thine!
A trembling world, and a devouring God!
Earth, but the shambles of Omnipotence!
Heaven's face all stained with causeless massacres ;
Of countless millions born to feel the pang
Of being lost. Lorenzo, can it be?

This bids us shudder at the thoughts of life.
Who would be born to such a phantom world,
Where naught substantial but our misery?
A world where dark mysterious vanity
Of good and ill the distant colors blends,
Confounds all reason, and all hope destroys;
A world so far from great (and yet how great
It shines to thee!) there's nothing real in it;
Being a shadow! consciousness a dream!
A dream, how dreadful; universal blank!
Before it and behind! poor man a spark-
From non-existence struck by wrath divine,
Glittering a moment, nor that moment sure,
'Midst upper, nether, and surrounding night,
His sad, sure, sudden, and eternal tomb.

REASONS FOR BELIEF.

WHAT am I? and from whence? I nothing know
But that I am; and since I am, conclude
Something eternal: had there e'er been naught,
Naught still had been: eternal there must be:
But what eternal? Why not human race,
And Adam's ancestors, without an end?
That's hard to be conceived; since every link
Of that long chained succession is so frail;
Can every part depend and not the whole?

Yet grant it true; new difficulties rise;

Whence earth and these bright orbs?—Eternal too? Grant matter was eternal; still these orbs

Would want some other father: much design

Is seen in all their motions, all their makes;

Design implies intelligence and art;

That can't be from themselves, or man: that art
Man scarce can comprehend, could man bestow?
And nothing greater yet allowed than man.
Who motion, foreign to the smallest grain,
Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?
Who bid brute matter's restive lump assume
Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?
Has matter innate motion? Then each atom,
Asserting its indisputable right

To dance, would form a universe of dust.

Has matter none? Then whence these glorious forms
And boundless lights from shapeless and reposed?
Has matter more than motion? Has it thought,
Judgment, and genius? Is it deeply learned
In mathematics? Has it framed such laws,
Which but to guess a Newton made immortal?
If so, how each sage alone laughs at me,
Who thinks a clod inferior to a man!

If art to form and counsel to conduct,
And that with greater far than human skill,
Resides not in each block,-a Godhead reigns.
Grant then invisible, eternal Mind;

That granted, all is solved-But granting that,
Draw I not o'er me still a darker cloud?
Grant I not that which I can ne'er conceive?

A being without origin or end!

Hail, human liberty! there is no God.

Yet why? on either scheme the knot subsists:
Subsist it must in God, or human race.
If in the last, how many knots besides,
Indissoluble all? Why choose it there,

Where, chosen, still subsist ten thousand more?

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