How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who centred in our make such strange extremes
From diff'rent natures marvellously mix'd,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguish'd sink in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam etherial sully'd and absorp❜d :
Though suily'd and dishonour'd, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust !
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surpris'd, aghast,
And wond'ring at her own. Her reason reels!
O what a miracle, to man, is man,
Triumphantly distress'd! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!
What can preserve my life! or what destroy! An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave: Legions of angels can't confine me there.
'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof. While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, What though my soul fantastic measures trod O'er fairy fields, or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods, or down the craggy steep
Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool
Or scal'd the cliff, or danc'd on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature
Of subtler essence than the trodden clod,
Active, aerial, tow'ring unconfin'd,
Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall.
E'en silent night proclaims my soul immortal;
E'en silent night proclaims eternal day.
For human weal heaven husbands all events:
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain.
Why then their loss deplore that are not lost?
Why wanders wretched Thought their tombs around
In infidel distress? Are angels there?
Slumbers, rak'd up in dust, etherial fire?
They live! they greatly live a life on earth
Unkindled, unconceiv'd, and from an eye
Of tenderness let heavenly pity fall
On me, more justly number'd with the dead.
This is the desart, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital is the grave!
This is Creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is Folly's creed.
How solid all, where change shall be no more?
This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule.
Life's theatre as yet is shut, and Death,
Strong Death, alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us, embryos of existence, free.
From real life but little more remote
Is he, not yet a candidate for light,
The future embryo, slumbʼring in his fire.
Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
Yon' ambient azure shell, and spring to life,
The life of gods, O transport! and of man.
Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts, Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Prisʼner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; wing'd by heaven
To fly at infinite, and reach it there,
Where seraphs gather immortality,
On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clust'ring glow
In his full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!
Where Time, and Pain, and Chance, and Death expire!
And is it in the flight of threescore years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness,
Thrown into tumult, raptur'd or alarm'd,
At ought this scene can threaten or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
Where falls this censure? It o'erwhelms myself.
How was my heart incrusted by the world!
O how self-fetter'd was my grov❜ling soul!
How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round
In silken thought, which reptile Fancy spun,
Till darken'd Reason lay quite clouded o'er,
With soft conceit of endless comfort here,
Nor yet put forth his wings to reach the skies!
Night-visions may befriend (as sung above):
Our waking dreams are fatal. How I dream'd
Of things impossible! (could sleep do more?)
Of joys perpetual in perpetual change!
Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave!
Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!
How richly were my noontide trances hung
With gorgeous tapestries of pictur'd joys!
Joy behind joy, in endless perspective!
Till at Death's toll, whose restless iron tongue
Calls daily for his millions at a meal,
Starting I woke, and found myself undone.
Where now my frenzy's pompous furniture?
The cobweb'd cottage, with its ragged wall.
Of mould'ring mud, is royalty to me!
The spider's most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable, to man's tender tie
On earthly bliss: it breaks at ev'ry breeze.
O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!
Full above measure! lasting beyond bound!
A perpetuity of bliss is bliss.
Could you, so rich in rapture, fear an end,
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light.
Safe are you lodg'd above these rolling spheres,
The baleful influence of whose giddy dance
Sheds sad vicissitude on all beneath.
Here teems with revolutions ev'ry hour,
And rarely for the better; or the best
More mortal than the common births of Fate.
Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root: each moment plays
His little weapon in the narrower sphere
Of sweet domestic comfort, and cuts down
The fairest bloom of sublunary bliss.
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