CANTO SEVENTH.

AGES again, with silent revolution,

Brought morn and even, noon and night, with all
The old vicissitudes of Nature's aspect:
Rains in their season fertilised the ground,
Winds sow'd the seeds of every kind of plant
On its peculiar soil; while suns matured

What winds had sown, and rains in season water'd,
Providing nourishment for all that lived:

Man's generations came and went like these,

-The grass and flowers that wither where they spring;

- The brutes that perish wholly where they fall.

Thus while I mused on these in long succession, And all remain'd as all had been before,

I cried, as I was wont, though none did listen,

-'Tis sweet sometimes to speak and be the hearer;

For he is twice himself who can converse

With his own thoughts, as with a living throng

Of fellow-travellers in solitude;

And mine too long had been my sole companions : "What is this mystery of human life?

In rude or civilised society,

Alike, a pilgrim's progress through this world
To that which is to come, by the same stages;

With infinite diversity of fortune
To each distinct adventurer by the way!

"Life is the transmigration of a soul Through various bodies, various states of being; New manners, passions, tastes, pursuits in each; In nothing, save in consciousness, the same. Infancy, adolescence, manhood, age, Are alway moving onward, alway losing Themselves in one another, lost at length, Like undulations, on the strand of death. The sage of threescore years and ten looks back,With many a pang of lingering tenderness, And many a shuddering conscience-fit, He hath been, is not, cannot be again; Nor trembles less with fear and hope, to think What he is now, but cannot long continue, And what he must be through uncounted ages.

on what

we know no more of happy child

Than happy childhood knows of wretched eld;
And all our dreams of its felicity

Are incoherent as its own crude visions:
We but begin to live from that fine point
Which memory dwells on, with the morning-star,
The earliest note we heard the cuckoo sing,
Or the first daisy that we ever pluck'd,

When thoughts themselves were stars, and birds, and flowers,

Pure brilliance, simplest music, wild perfume.

Thenceforward, mark the metamorphoses!

The Boy, the Girl; — when all was joy, hope, promise;

Yet who would be a Boy, a Girl again,

To bear the yoke, to long for liberty,

And dream of what will never come to pass?

-The Youth, the Maiden; living but for love,
Yet learning soon that life hath other cares,
And joys less rapturous, but more enduring:
-The Woman; - in her offspring multiplied;
A tree of life, whose glory is her branches,
Beneath whose shadow, she (both root and stem)
Delights to dwell in meek obscurity,

That they may be the pleasure of beholders:
-The Man: as father of a progeny,

Whose birth requires his death to make them room,
Yet in whose lives he feels his resurrection,
And grows immortal in his children's children :

Then the grey Elder; — leaning on his staff, And bow'd beneath a weight of years, that steal Upon him with the secrecy of sleep,

(No snow falls lighter than the snow of age, None with such subtilty benumbs the frame,) Till he forgets sensation, and lies down

Dead in the lap of his primeval mother;

She throws a shroud of turf and flowers around him, Then calls the worms, and bids them do their office: Man giveth up the ghost, and where is He?"

That startling question broke my lucubration; I saw those changes realised before me; Saw them recurring in perpetual line,

The line unbroken, while the thread ran on,
Failing at this extreme, at that renew'd,

Like buds, leaves, blossoms, fruits on herbs and

trees;

Like mites, flies, reptiles; birds, and beasts, and

fishes,

Of every length of period here, all mortal,

And all resolved into those elements

Whence they had emanated, whence they drew
Their sustenance, and which their wrecks recruited
To generate and foster other forms

As like themselves as were the lights of heaven,
For ever moving in serene succession,

Not like those lights unquenchable by time,
But ever changing, like the clouds that come,
Who can tell whence? and go, who can tell whither?
Thus the swift series of man's race elapsed,

As for no higher destiny created

Than aught beneath them, - from the elephant

Down to the worm, thence to the zoophyte,

That link which binds Prometheus to his rock,
The living fibre to insensate matter.

They were not, then they were; the unborn, the living!

They were, then were not; they had lived and died;
No trace, no record of their date remaining,

Save in the memory of kindred beings,
Themselves as surely hastening to oblivion;
Till, where the soil had been renew'd by relics,
And earth, air, water were one sepulchre,
Earth, air, and water might be search'd in vain,

Atom by atom scrutinised with eyes
Of microscopic power, that could discern
The population of a dew-drop, yet

No particle betray the buried secret

Of what they had been, or of what they were:
Life thus was swallow'd by mortality,

Mortality thus swallow'd up of life,

And man remain'd the world's unmoved possessor, Though every moment men appear'd and vanish'd.

Oh! 'twas heart-sickness to behold them thus Perishing without knowledge;- perishing, As though they were but things of dust and ashes. They lived unconscious of their noblest powers, As were the rocks and mountains which they trod Of gold and jewels hidden in their bowels; They lived unconscious of what lived within them, The deathless spirit, as were the stars that shone Above their heads, of their own emanations. And did it live within them? did there dwell Fire brought from heaven in forms of miry clay? Untemper'd as the slime of Babel's builders, And left unfinish'd like their monstrous work? To me, alas! they seem'd but living bodies, With still-born souls which never could be quicken'd, Till death brought immortality to light,

And from the darkness of their earthly prison

Placed them at once before the bar of God;

Then first to learn, at their eternal peril,
The fact of his existence and their own.
Imagination durst not follow them,