Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that Hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest;
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.
Made for his use all creatures if he call,
Say, what their use, had he the powers of all?
Nature to these, without profusion, kind,
The proper organs, proper powers assigned;
Each seeming want compensated of course,
Here, with degrees of swiftness, there, of force;
All in exact proportion to the state;
Nothing to add, and nothing to abate.
Each beast, each insect, happy in its own,
Is heaven unkind to man, and man alone?
Shall he alone, whom rational we call,
Be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all?
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act, or think, beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.
Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason-man is not a fly.
Say, what the use, were finer optics given,
To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven?
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,
To smart and agonize at every pore?
Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,
Die of a rose in aromatic pain?
If nature thundered in his opening ears,
And stunned him1 with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish that heaven had left him still
The whispering zephyr, and the purling rill!
1 And stunned him, &c.—“ It is justly objected," remarks Dr. Warton, "that the argument required an instance drawn from real sound, and not from the imaginary music of the spheres."
Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what denies ?
GRADATION OF THE SENSUAL AND MENTAL FACULTIES.
FAR as creation's ample range extends,
The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends;
Mark how it mounts to man's imperial race
From the green myriads1 in the peopled grass:
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam;
Of smell, the headlong lioness between,
And hound sagacious on the tainted green;
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,
To that which warbles through the vernal wood.
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:
In the nice bee, what sense, su subtly true,
From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew?
How instinct varies in the grovelling swine,
Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine!
"Twixt that and reason what a nice barrièr!
For ever separate, yet for ever near!
Remembrance and reflection3 how allied!
What thin partitions sense from thought divide!
And middle natures, how they long to join,
Yet never pass the insuperable line!
Without this just gradation could they be
Subjected, these to those, or all to thee?
The powers of all subdued by thee alone,
Is not thy reason all these powers in one?
See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth.
From the green myriads, &c.-This and the eight following lines have elicited the warm eulogiums of Dr. Warton and Mr. Campbell, the latter of whom remarks, that "every epithet is a decisive touch."
2 Half-reasoning elephant-There can be little doubt that animals possess to some extent the reasoning faculty. What they distinctively lack is the imaginative power-the ability to live out of and beyond the immediate sphere of the present moment.
3 Remembrance and reflection-Remembrance is an involuntary, and reflection a voluntary act of the mind. The former furnishes the materials on which the latter operates.
Above, how high progressive life may go!
Around how wide; how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing.-On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,
Or hand to toil, aspired to be the head?
What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?
Just as absurd, for any part to claim
To be another in this general frame:
Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains;
The great directing Mind of All ordains.
All are but parts1 of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns;
To Him, no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all.
Cease then, nor Order Imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
1 All are but parts, &c.-Our language scarcely contains a more striking representation of the Omnipresence of the Deity than that contained in these lines, "which have," as Dr. Warton remarks, "all the energy and harmony that can be given to rhyme."
Submit-in this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
KNOW then this truth, (enough for man to know,)
"Virtue alone is happiness below;"
The only point where human bliss stands still,
And tastes the good without the fall to ill;
Where only1 merit constant pay receives,
Is blest in what it takes, and what it gives;
The joy unequalled, if its end it gain,
And if it lose, attended with no pain:
Without satiety, though e'er so blessed,
And but more relished as the more distressed.
The broadest mirth unfeeling folly wears,
Less pleasing far than virtue's very tears:
Good, from each object, from each place acquired,
For ever exercised, yet never tired;
Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, while another's blest;
And where no wants, no wishes can remain,
Since but to wish more virtue is to gain.
See the sole bliss Heaven could on all bestow!
Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know :
Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind,
The bad must miss, the good untaught will find;
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through nature up to nature's God;
Pursues that chain which links the immense design,
Joins heaven and earth, and mortal and divine;
Sees that no being any bliss can know,
But touches some above and some below;
Where only, &c.-A sentiment equivalent to the well known maxim, " Virtue
2 Since but to wish, &c.-i. e. the very wish for more is more.
Learns from this union of the rising whole,
The first, last purpose of the human soul;
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began,
All end, in love of God, and love of man.
For him alone hope leads from goal to goal,
And opens still, and opens on his soul;
Till lengthened on to faith,1 and unconfined,
pours the bliss that fills up all the mind.
He sees, why nature plants in man alone
Hope of known bliss, and faith in bliss unknown:
(Nature, whose dictates to no other kind
Are given in vain, but what they seek, they find :)
Wise is her present; she connects in this
His greatest virtue with his greatest bliss;
At once his own bright prospect to be blest,
And strongest motive to assist the rest.
Self-love thus pushed to social, to divine,
Gives thee to make thy neighbour's blessing thine :
Is this too little for the boundless heart?
Extend it, let thy enemies have part:
Grasp the whole worlds of reason, life, and sense,
In one close system of benevolence:
Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree;
And height of bliss but height of charity.
God loves from whole to parts; but human soul
Must rise from individual to the whole.
Self-love2 but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds;
Another still, and still another spreads:
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next, and next all human race;
Wide and more wide, the o'erflowings of the mind
Take every creature in of every kind;
Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heaven behold its image in his breast.
Lengthened on to faith-i. e. Hope is extended or intersified until it becomes
2 Self-love, &c.-The aptness and beauty of this simile cannot but be admired.
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