Queen Mab

A PHILOSOPHICAL POEM, WITH

ECRASEZ L'INFAME!--Correspondance de Voltaire.

Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius anteTrita solo; juvat integros accedere fonteis;Atque haurire: juvatque novos decerpere flores.5

...

Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus; et arctisReligionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo.--Lucret. lib. 4.

Dos pon sto, kai kosmon kineso.--Archimedes.10

TO HARRIET **.

Whose is the love that gleaming through the world,Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?Whose is the warm and partial praise,Virtue's most sweet reward?15

Beneath whose looks did my reviving soulRiper in truth and virtuous daring grow?Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,And loved mankind the more?

HARRIET! on thine:--thou wert my purer mind;20Thou wert the inspiration of my song;Thine are these early wilding flowers,Though garlanded by me.

Then press into thy breast this pledge of love;And know, though time may change and years may roll,25Each floweret gathered in my heartIt consecrates to thine.

QUEEN MAB.

How wonderful is Death,Death and his brother Sleep!30One, pale as yonder waning moonWith lips of lurid blue;The other, rosy as the mornWhen throned on ocean's waveIt blushes o'er the world:35Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy PowerWhose reign is in the tainted sepulchresSeized on her sinless soul?Must then that peerless form40Which love and admiration cannot viewWithout a beating heart, those azure veinsWhich steal like streams along a field of snow,That lovely outline, which is fairAs breathing marble, perish?45Must putrefaction's breathLeave nothing of this heavenly sightBut loathsomeness and ruin?Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,On which the lightest heart might moralize?50Or is it only a sweet slumberStealing o'er sensation,Which the breath of roseate morningChaseth into darkness?Will Ianthe wake again,55And give that faithful bosom joyWhose sleepless spirit waits to catchLight, life and rapture from her smile?

Yes! she will wake again,Although her glowing limbs are motionless,60And silent those sweet lips,Once breathing eloquence,That might have soothed a tiger's rage,Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.Her dewy eyes are closed,65And on their lids, whose texture fineScarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,The baby Sleep is pillowed:Her golden tresses shadeThe bosom's stainless pride,70Curling like tendrils of the parasiteAround a marble column.

Hark! whence that rushing sound?'Tis like the wondrous strainThat round a lonely ruin swells,75Which, wandering on the echoing shore,The enthusiast hears at evening:'Tis softer than the west wind's sigh;'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notesOf that strange lyre whose strings80The genii of the breezes sweep:Those lines of rainbow lightAre like the moonbeams when they fallThrough some cathedral window, but the tintsAre such as may not find85Comparison on earth.

Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen!Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air;Their filmy pennons at her word they furl,And stop obedient to the reins of light:90These the Queen of Spells drew in,She spread a charm around the spot,And leaning graceful from the aethereal car,Long did she gaze, and silently,Upon the slumbering maid.95

Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams,When silvery clouds float through the 'wildered brain,When every sight of lovely, wild and grandAstonishes, enraptures, elevates,When fancy at a glance combines100The wondrous and the beautiful,--So bright, so fair, so wild a shapeHath ever yet beheld,As that which reined the coursers of the air,And poured the magic of her gaze105Upon the maiden's sleep.

The broad and yellow moonShone dimly through her form--That form of faultless symmetry;The pearly and pellucid car110Moved not the moonlight's line:'Twas not an earthly pageant:Those who had looked upon the sight,Passing all human glory,Saw not the yellow moon,115Saw not the mortal scene,Heard not the night-wind's rush,Heard not an earthly sound,Saw but the fairy pageant,Heard but the heavenly strains120That filled the lonely dwelling.

The Fairy's frame was slight, yon fibrous cloud,That catches but the palest tinge of even,And which the straining eye can hardly seizeWhen melting into eastern twilight's shadow,125Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair starThat gems the glittering coronet of morn,Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form,Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,130Yet with an undulating motion,Swayed to her outline gracefully.

From her celestial carThe Fairy Queen descended,And thrice she waved her wand135Circled with wreaths of amaranth:Her thin and misty formMoved with the moving air,And the clear silver tones,As thus she spoke, were such140As are unheard by all but gifted ear.

FAIRY:'Stars! your balmiest influence shed!Elements! your wrath suspend!Sleep, Ocean, in the rocky bounds145That circle thy domain!Let not a breath be seen to stirAround yon grass-grown ruin's height,Let even the restless gossamerSleep on the moveless air!150Soul of Ianthe! thou,Judged alone worthy of the envied boon,That waits the good and the sincere; that waitsThose who have struggled, and with resolute willVanquished earth's pride and meanness, burst the chains,155The icy chains of custom, and have shoneThe day-stars of their age;--Soul of Ianthe!Awake! arise!'

Sudden aroseIanthe's Soul; it stood160All beautiful in naked purity,The perfect semblance of its bodily frame.Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace,Each stain of earthlinessHad passed away, it reassumed165Its native dignity, and stoodImmortal amid ruin.

Upon the couch the body layWrapped in the depth of slumber:Its features were fixed and meaningless,170Yet animal life was there,And every organ yet performedIts natural functions: 'twas a sightOf wonder to behold the body and soul.The self-same lineaments, the same175Marks of identity were there:Yet, oh, how different! One aspires to Heaven,Pants for its sempiternal heritage,And ever-changing, ever-rising still,Wantons in endless being.180The other, for a time the unwilling sportOf circumstance and passion, struggles on;Fleets through its sad duration rapidly:Then, like an useless and worn-out machine,Rots, perishes, and passes.185

FAIRY:'Spirit! who hast dived so deep;Spirit! who hast soared so high;Thou the fearless, thou the mild,Accept the boon thy worth hath earned,190Ascend the car with me.'

SPIRIT:'Do I dream? Is this new feelingBut a visioned ghost of slumber?If indeed I am a soul,195A free, a disembodied soul,Speak again to me.'

FAIRY:'I am the Fairy MAB: to me 'tis givenThe wonders of the human world to keep:200The secrets of the immeasurable past,In the unfailing consciences of men,Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find:The future, from the causes which ariseIn each event, I gather: not the sting205Which retributive memory implantsIn the hard bosom of the selfish man;Nor that ecstatic and exulting throbWhich virtue's votary feels when he sums upThe thoughts and actions of a well-spent day,210Are unforeseen, unregistered by me:And it is yet permitted me, to rendThe veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit,Clothed in its changeless purity, may knowHow soonest to accomplish the great end215For which it hath its being, and may tasteThat peace, which in the end all life will share.This is the meed of virtue; happy Soul,Ascend the car with me!'

The chains of earth's immurement220Fell from Ianthe's spirit;They shrank and brake like bandages of strawBeneath a wakened giant's strength.She knew her glorious change,And felt in apprehension uncontrolled225New raptures opening round:Each day-dream of her mortal life,Each frenzied vision of the slumbersThat closed each well-spent day,Seemed now to meet reality.230

The Fairy and the Soul proceeded;The silver clouds disparted;And as the car of magic they ascended,Again the speechless music swelled,Again the coursers of the air235Unfurled their azure pennons, and the QueenShaking the beamy reinsBade them pursue their way.

The magic car moved on.The night was fair, and countless stars240Studded Heaven's dark blue vault,--Just o'er the eastern wavePeeped the first faint smile of morn:--The magic car moved on--From the celestial hoofs245The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew,And where the burning wheelsEddied above the mountain's loftiest peak,Was traced a line of lightning.Now it flew far above a rock,250The utmost verge of earth,The rival of the Andes, whose dark browLowered o'er the silver sea.

Far, far below the chariot's path,Calm as a slumbering babe,255Tremendous Ocean lay.The mirror of its stillness showedThe pale and waning stars,The chariot's fiery track,And the gray light of morn260Tinging those fleecy cloudsThat canopied the dawn.Seemed it, that the chariot's wayLay through the midst of an immense concave,Radiant with million constellations, tinged265With shades of infinite colour,And semicircled with a beltFlashing incessant meteors.

The magic car moved on.As they approached their goal270The coursers seemed to gather speed;The sea no longer was distinguished; earthAppeared a vast and shadowy sphere;The sun's unclouded orbRolled through the black concave;275Its rays of rapid lightParted around the chariot's swifter course,And fell, like ocean's feathery sprayDashed from the boiling surgeBefore a vessel's prow.280

The magic car moved on.Earth's distant orb appearedThe smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;Whilst round the chariot's wayInnumerable systems rolled,285And countless spheres diffusedAn ever-varying glory.It was a sight of wonder: someWere horned like the crescent moon;Some shed a mild and silver beam290Like Hesperus o'er the western sea;Some dashed athwart with trains of flame,Like worlds to death and ruin driven;Some shone like suns, and, as the chariot passed,Eclipsed all other light.295

Spirit of Nature! here!In this interminable wildernessOf worlds, at whose immensityEven soaring fancy staggers,Here is thy fitting temple.300Yet not the lightest leafThat quivers to the passing breezeIs less instinct with thee:Yet not the meanest wormThat lurks in graves and fattens on the dead305Less shares thy eternal breath.Spirit of Nature! thou!Imperishable as this scene,Here is thy fitting temple.

If solitude hath ever led thy steps310To the wild Ocean's echoing shore,And thou hast lingered there,Until the sun's broad orbSeemed resting on the burnished wave,Thou must have marked the lines315Of purple gold, that motionlessHung o'er the sinking sphere:Thou must have marked the billowy cloudsEdged with intolerable radiancyTowering like rocks of jet320Crowned with a diamond wreath.And yet there is a moment,When the sun's highest pointPeeps like a star o'er Ocean's western edge,When those far clouds of feathery gold,325Shaded with deepest purple, gleamLike islands on a dark blue sea;Then has thy fancy soared above the earth,And furled its wearied wingWithin the Fairy's fane.330

Yet not the golden islandsGleaming in yon flood of light,Nor the feathery curtainsStretching o'er the sun's bright couch,Nor the burnished Ocean waves335Paving that gorgeous dome,So fair, so wonderful a sightAs Mab's aethereal palace could afford.Yet likest evening's vault, that faery Hall!As Heaven, low resting on the wave,it spread340Its floors of flashing light,Its vast and azure dome,Its fertile golden islandsFloating on a silver sea;Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted345Through clouds of circumambient darkness,And pearly battlements aroundLooked o'er the immense of Heaven.

The magic car no longer moved.The Fairy and the Spirit350Entered the Hall of Spells:Those golden cloudsThat rolled in glittering billowsBeneath the azure canopyWith the aethereal footsteps trembled not:355The light and crimson mists,Floating to strains of thrilling melodyThrough that unearthly dwelling,Yielded to every movement of the will.Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned,360And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,Used not the glorious privilegeOf virtue and of wisdom.

'Spirit!' the Fairy said,And pointed to the gorgeous dome,365'This is a wondrous sightAnd mocks all human grandeur;But, were it virtue's only meed, to dwellIn a celestial palace, all resignedTo pleasurable impulses, immured370Within the prison of itself, the willOf changeless Nature would be unfulfilled.Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come!This is thine high reward:--the past shall rise;Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach375The secrets of the future.'

The Fairy and the SpiritApproached the overhanging battlement.--Below lay stretched the universe!There, far as the remotest line380That bounds imagination's flight,Countless and unending orbsIn mazy motion intermingled,Yet still fulfilled immutablyEternal Nature's law.385Above, below, around,The circling systems formedA wilderness of harmony;Each with undeviating aim,In eloquent silence, through the depths of space390Pursued its wondrous way.

There was a little lightThat twinkled in the misty distance:None but a spirit's eyeMight ken that rolling orb;395None but a spirit's eye,And in no other placeBut that celestial dwelling, might beholdEach action of this earth's inhabitants.But matter, space and time400In those aereal mansions cease to act;And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reapsThe harvest of its excellence, o'er-boundsThose obstacles, of which an earthly soulFears to attempt the conquest.405

The Fairy pointed to the earth.The Spirit's intellectual eyeIts kindred beings recognized.The thronging thousands, to a passing view,Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens.410How wonderful! that evenThe passions, prejudices, interests,That sway the meanest being, the weak touchThat moves the finest nerve,And in one human brain415Causes the faintest thought, becomes a linkIn the great chain of Nature.

'Behold,' the Fairy cried,'Palmyra's ruined palaces!--Behold! where grandeur frowned;420Behold! where pleasure smiled;What now remains?--the memoryOf senselessness and shame--What is immortal there?Nothing--it stands to tell425A melancholy tale, to giveAn awful warning: soonOblivion will steal silentlyThe remnant of its fame.Monarchs and conquerors there430Proud o'er prostrate millions trod--The earthquakes of the human race;Like them, forgotten when the ruinThat marks their shock is past.

'Beside the eternal Nile,435The Pyramids have risen.Nile shall pursue his changeless way:Those Pyramids shall fall;Yea! not a stone shall stand to tellThe spot whereon they stood!440Their very site shall be forgotten,As is their builder's name!

'Behold yon sterile spot;Where now the wandering Arab's tentFlaps in the desert-blast.445There once old Salem's haughty faneReared high to Heaven its thousand golden domes,And in the blushing face of dayExposed its shameful glory.Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed450The building of that fane; and many a father;Worn out with toil and slavery, imploredThe poor man's God to sweep it from the earth,And spare his children the detested taskOf piling stone on stone, and poisoning455The choicest days of life,To soothe a dotard's vanity.There an inhuman and uncultured raceHowled hideous praises to their Demon-God;They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb460The unborn child,--old age and infancyPromiscuous perished; their victorious armsLeft not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends:But what was he who taught them that the GodOf nature and benevolence hath given465A special sanction to the trade of blood?His name and theirs are fading, and the talesOf this barbarian nation, which impostureRecites till terror credits, are pursuingItself into forgetfulness.470

'Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,There is a moral desert now:The mean and miserable huts,The yet more wretched palaces,Contrasted with those ancient fanes,475Now crumbling to oblivion;The long and lonely colonnades,Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,Seem like a well-known tune,Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear,480Remembered now in sadness.But, oh! how much more changed,How gloomier is the contrastOf human nature there!Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,485A coward and a fool, spreads death around--Then, shuddering, meets his own.Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,A cowled and hypocritical monkPrays, curses and deceives.490

'Spirit, ten thousand yearsHave scarcely passed away,Since, in the waste where now the savage drinksHis enemy's blood, and aping Europe's sons,Wakes the unholy song of war, Arose a stately city,495Metropolis of the western continent:There, now, the mossy column-stone,Indented by Time's unrelaxing grasp,Which once appeared to braveAll, save its country's ruin;500There the wide forest scene,Rude in the uncultivated lovelinessOf gardens long run wild,Seems, to the unwilling sojourner, whose stepsChance in that desert has delayed,505Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.Yet once it was the busiest haunt,Whither, as to a common centre, flockedStrangers, and ships, and merchandise:Once peace and freedom blessed510The cultivated plain:But wealth, that curse of man,Blighted the bud of its prosperity:Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,Fled, to return not, until man shall know515That they alone can give the blissWorthy a soul that claimsIts kindred with eternity.

'There's not one atom of yon earthBut once was living man;520Nor the minutest drop of rain,That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,But flowed in human veins:And from the burning plainsWhere Libyan monsters yell,525From the most gloomy glensOf Greenland's sunless clime,To where the golden fieldsOf fertile England spreadTheir harvest to the day,530Thou canst not find one spotWhereon no city stood.

'How strange is human pride!I tell thee that those living things,To whom the fragile blade of grass,535That springeth in the mornAnd perisheth ere noon,Is an unbounded world;I tell thee that those viewless beings,Whose mansion is the smallest particle540Of the impassive atmosphere,Think, feel and live like man;That their affections and antipathies,Like his, produce the lawsRuling their moral state;545And the minutest throbThat through their frame diffusesThe slightest, faintest motion,Is fixed and indispensableAs the majestic laws550That rule yon rolling orbs.'

The Fairy paused. The Spirit,In ecstasy of admiration, feltAll knowledge of the past revived; the eventsOf old and wondrous times,555Which dim tradition interruptedlyTeaches the credulous vulgar, were unfoldedIn just perspective to the view;Yet dim from their infinitude.The Spirit seemed to stand560High on an isolated pinnacle;The flood of ages combating below,The depth of the unbounded universeAbove, and all aroundNature's unchanging harmony.565

'Fairy!' the Spirit said,And on the Queen of SpellsFixed her aethereal eyes,'I thank thee. Thou hast givenA boon which I will not resign, and taught570A lesson not to be unlearned. I knowThe past, and thence I will essay to gleanA warning for the future, so that manMay profit by his errors, and deriveExperience from his folly:575For, when the power of imparting joyIs equal to the will, the human soulRequires no other Heaven.'

MAB:'Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!580Much yet remains unscanned.Thou knowest how great is man,Thou knowest his imbecility:Yet learn thou what he is:Yet learn the lofty destiny585Which restless time preparesFor every living soul.

'Behold a gorgeous palace, that, amidYon populous city rears its thousand towersAnd seems itself a city. Gloomy troops590Of sentinels, in stern and silent ranks,Encompass it around: the dweller thereCannot be free and happy; hearest thou notThe curses of the fatherless, the groansOf those who have no friend? He passes on:595The King, the wearer of a gilded chainThat binds his soul to abjectness, the foolWhom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slaveEven to the basest appetites--that manHeeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles600At the deep curses which the destituteMutter in secret, and a sullen joyPervades his bloodless heart when thousands groanBut for those morsels which his wantonnessWastes in unjoyous revelry, to save605All that they love from famine: when he hearsThe tale of horror, to some ready-made faceOf hypocritical assent he turns,Smothering the glow of shame, that, spite of him,Flushes his bloated cheek.610Now to the mealOf silence, grandeur, and excess, he dragsHis palled unwilling appetite. If gold,Gleaming around, and numerous viands culledFrom every clime, could force the loathing sense615To overcome satiety,--if wealthThe spring it draws from poisons not,--or vice,Unfeeling, stubborn vice, converteth notIts food to deadliest venom; then that kingIs happy; and the peasant who fulfils620His unforced task, when he returns at even,And by the blazing faggot meets againHer welcome for whom all his toil is sped,Tastes not a sweeter meal.Behold him now625Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brainReels dizzily awhile: but ah! too soonThe slumber of intemperance subsides,And conscience, that undying serpent, callsHer venomous brood to their nocturnal task.630Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye--Oh! mark that deadly visage.'

KING:'No cessation!Oh! must this last for ever? Awful Death,635I wish, yet fear to clasp thee!--Not one momentOf dreamless sleep! O dear and blessed peace!Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purityIn penury and dungeons? wherefore lurkestWith danger, death, and solitude; yet shunn'st640The palace I have built thee? Sacred peace!Oh visit me but once, but pitying shedOne drop of balm upon my withered soul.'

THE FAIRY:'Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart,645And Peace defileth not her snowy robesIn such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters;His slumbers are but varied agonies,They prey like scorpions on the springs of life.There needeth not the hell that bigots frame650To punish those who err: earth in itselfContains at once the evil and the cure;And all-sufficing Nature can chastiseThose who transgress her law,--she only knowsHow justly to proportion to the fault655The punishment it merits.Is it strangeThat this poor wretch should pride him in his woe?Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hugThe scorpion that consumes him? Is it strange660That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns,Grasping an iron sceptre, and immuredWithin a splendid prison, whose stern boundsShut him from all that's good or dear on earth,His soul asserts not its humanity?665That man's mild nature rises not in warAgainst a king's employ? No--'tis not strange.He, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts and livesJust as his father did; the unconquered powersOf precedent and custom interpose670Between a KING and virtue. Stranger yet,To those who know not Nature, nor deduceThe future from the present, it may seem,That not one slave, who suffers from the crimesOf this unnatural being; not one wretch,675Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bedIs earth's unpitying bosom, rears an armTo dash him from his throne!Those gilded fliesThat, basking in the sunshine of a court,680Fatten on its corruption!--what are they?--The drones of the community; they feedOn the mechanic's labour: the starved hindFor them compels the stubborn glebe to yieldIts unshared harvests; and yon squalid form,685Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastesA sunless life in the unwholesome mine,Drags out in labour a protracted death,To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil,That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.690

'Whence, think'st thou, kings and parasites arose?Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heapToil and unvanquishable penuryOn those who build their palaces, and bringTheir daily bread?--From vice, black loathsome vice;695From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong;From all that 'genders misery, and makesOf earth this thorny wilderness; from lust,Revenge, and murder...And when Reason's voice,Loud as the voice of Nature, shall have waked700The nations; and mankind perceive that viceIs discord, war, and misery; that virtueIs peace, and happiness and harmony;When man's maturer nature shall disdainThe playthings of its childhood;--kingly glare705Will lose its power to dazzle; its authorityWill silently pass by; the gorgeous throneShall stand unnoticed in the regal hall,Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood's tradeShall be as hateful and unprofitable710As that of truth is now.Where is the fameWhich the vainglorious mighty of the earthSeek to eternize? Oh! the faintest soundFrom Time's light footfall, the minutest wave715That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothingThe unsubstantial bubble. Ay! todayStern is the tyrant's mandate, red the gazeThat flashes desolation, strong the armThat scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes!720That mandate is a thunder-peal that diedIn ages past; that gaze, a transient flashOn which the midnight closed, and on that armThe worm has made his meal.The virtuous man,725Who, great in his humility, as kingsAre little in their grandeur; he who leadsInvincibly a life of resolute good,And stands amid the silent dungeon depthsMore free and fearless than the trembling judge,730Who, clothed in venal power, vainly stroveTo bind the impassive spirit;--when he falls,His mild eye beams benevolence no more:Withered the hand outstretched but to relieve;Sunk Reason's simple eloquence, that rolled735But to appal the guilty. Yes! the graveHath quenched that eye, and Death's relentless frostWithered that arm: but the unfading fameWhich Virtue hangs upon its votary's tomb;The deathless memory of that man, whom kings740Call to their mind and tremble; the remembranceWith which the happy spirit contemplatesIts well-spent pilgrimage on earth,Shall never pass away.

'Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;745The subject, not the citizen: for kingsAnd subjects, mutual foes, forever playA losing game into each other's hands,Whose stakes are vice and misery. The manOf virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.750Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanized automaton.755When Nero,High over flaming Rome, with savage joyLowered like a fiend, drank with enraptured earThe shrieks of agonizing death, beheldThe frightful desolation spread, and felt760A new-created sense within his soulThrill to the sight, and vibrate to the sound;Think'st thou his grandeur had not overcomeThe force of human kindness? and, when Rome,With one stern blow, hurled not the tyrant down,765Crushed not the arm red with her dearest bloodHad not submissive abjectness destroyedNature's suggestions?Look on yonder earth:The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun770Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,Arise in due succession; all things speakPeace, harmony, and love. The universe,In Nature's silent eloquence, declaresThat all fulfil the works of love and joy,--775All but the outcast, Man. He fabricatesThe sword which stabs his peace; he cherishethThe snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth upThe tyrant, whose delight is in his woe,Whose sport is in his agony. Yon sun,780Lights it the great alone? Yon silver beams,Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatchThan on the dome of kings? Is mother EarthA step-dame to her numerous sons, who earnHer unshared gifts with unremitting toil;785A mother only to those puling babesWho, nursed in ease and luxury, make menThe playthings of their babyhood, and mar,In self-important childishness, that peaceWhich men alone appreciate?790

'Spirit of Nature! no.The pure diffusion of thy essence throbsAlike in every human heart.Thou, aye, erectest thereThy throne of power unappealable:795Thou art the judge beneath whose nodMan's brief and frail authorityIs powerless as the windThat passeth idly by.Thine the tribunal which surpasseth800The show of human justice,As God surpasses man.

'Spirit of Nature! thouLife of interminable multitudes;Soul of those mighty spheres805Whose changeless paths throughHeaven's deep silence lie;Soul of that smallest being,The dwelling of whose lifeIs one faint April sun-gleam;--810Man, like these passive things,Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth:Like theirs, his age of endless peace,Which time is fast maturing,Will swiftly, surely come;815And the unbounded frame, which thou pervadest,Will be without a flawMarring its perfect symmetry.

'How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,820Were discord to the speaking quietudeThat wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault,Studded with stars unutterably bright,Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,Seems like a canopy which love had spread825To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills,Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend,So stainless, that their white and glittering spiresTinge not the moon's pure beam; yon castled steep,830Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn towerSo idly, that rapt fancy deemeth itA metaphor of peace;--all form a sceneWhere musing Solitude might love to liftHer soul above this sphere of earthliness;835Where Silence undisturbed might watch alone,So cold, so bright, so still.The orb of day,In southern climes, o'er ocean's waveless fieldSinks sweetly smiling: not the faintest breath840Steals o'er the unruffled deep; the clouds of eveReflect unmoved the lingering beam of day;And vesper's image on the western mainIs beautifully still. To-morrow comes:Cloud upon cloud, in dark and deepening mass,845Roll o'er the blackened waters; the deep roarOf distant thunder mutters awfully;Tempest unfolds its pinion o'er the gloomThat shrouds the boiling surge; the pitiless fiend,With all his winds and lightnings, tracks his prey;850The torn deep yawns,--the vessel finds a graveBeneath its jagged gulf.Ah! whence yon glareThat fires the arch of Heaven!--that dark red smokeBlotting the silver moon? The stars are quenched855In darkness, and the pure and spangling snowGleams faintly through the gloom that gathers round!Hark to that roar, whose swift and deaf'ning pealsIn countless echoes through the mountains ring,Startling pale Midnight on her starry throne!860Now swells the intermingling din; the jarFrequent and frightful of the bursting bomb;The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout,The ceaseless clangour, and the rush of menInebriate with rage:--loud, and more loud865The discord grows; till pale Death shuts the scene,And o'er the conqueror and the conquered drawsHis cold and bloody shroud.--Of all the menWhom day's departing beam saw blooming there,In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts870That beat with anxious life at sunset there;How few survive, how few are beating now!All is deep silence, like the fearful calmThat slumbers in the storm's portentous pause;Save when the frantic wail of widowed love875Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moanWith which some soul bursts from the frame of clayWrapped round its struggling powers.The gray mornDawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke880Before the icy wind slow rolls away,And the bright beams of frosty morning danceAlong the spangling snow. There tracks of bloodEven to the forest's depth, and scattered arms,And lifeless warriors, whose hard lineaments885Death's self could change not, mark the dreadful pathOf the outsallying victors: far behind,Black ashes note where their proud city stood.Within yon forest is a gloomy glen--Each tree which guards its darkness from the day,890Waves o'er a warrior's tomb.I see thee shrink,Surpassing Spirit!--wert thou human else?I see a shade of doubt and horror fleetAcross thy stainless features: yet fear not;895This is no unconnected misery,Nor stands uncaused, and irretrievable.Man's evil nature, that apologyWhich kings who rule, and cowards who crouch, set upFor their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood900Which desolates the discord-wasted land.From kings, and priests, and statesmen, war arose,Whose safety is man's deep unbettered woe,Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axeStrike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;905And where its venomed exhalations spreadRuin, and death, and woe, where millions layQuenching the serpent's famine, and their bonesBleaching unburied in the putrid blast,A garden shall arise, in loveliness910Surpassing fabled Eden.Hath Nature's soul,That formed this world so beautiful, that spreadEarth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chordStrung to unchanging unison, that gave915The happy birds their dwelling in the grove,That yielded to the wanderers of the deepThe lovely silence of the unfathomed main,And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dustWith spirit, thought, and love; on Man alone,920Partial in causeless malice, wantonlyHeaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soulBlasted with withering curses; placed afarThe meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,But serving on the frightful gulf to glare,925Rent wide beneath his footsteps?Nature!--no!Kings, priests, and statesmen, blast the human flowerEven in its tender bud; their influence dartsLike subtle poison through the bloodless veins930Of desolate society. The child,Ere he can lisp his mother's sacred name,Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and liftsHis baby-sword even in a hero's mood.This infant-arm becomes the bloodiest scourge935Of devastated earth; whilst specious names,Learned in soft childhood's unsuspecting hour,Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dimsBright Reason's ray, and sanctifies the swordUpraised to shed a brother's innocent blood.940Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that manInherits vice and misery, when ForceAnd Falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babeStifling with rudest grasp all natural good.'Ah! to the stranger-soul, when first it peeps945From its new tenement, and looks abroadFor happiness and sympathy, how sternAnd desolate a tract is this wide world!How withered all the buds of natural good!No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms950Of pitiless power! On its wretched frame,Poisoned, perchance, by the disease and woeHeaped on the wretched parent whence it sprungBy morals, law, and custom, the pure windsOf Heaven, that renovate the insect tribes,955May breathe not. The untainting light of dayMay visit not its longings. It is boundEre it has life: yea, all the chains are forgedLong ere its being: all liberty and loveAnd peace is torn from its defencelessness;960Cursed from its birth, even from its cradle doomedTo abjectness and bondage!

'Throughout this varied and eternal worldSoul is the only element: the blockThat for uncounted ages has remained965The moveless pillar of a mountain's weightIs active, living spirit. Every grainIs sentient both in unity and part,And the minutest atom comprehendsA world of loves and hatreds; these beget970Evil and good: hence truth and falsehood spring;Hence will and thought and action, all the germsOf pain or pleasure, sympathy or hate,That variegate the eternal universe.Soul is not more polluted than the beams975Of Heaven's pure orb, ere round their rapid linesThe taint of earth-born atmospheres arise.

'Man is of soul and body, formed for deedsOf high resolve, on fancy's boldest wingTo soar unwearied, fearlessly to turn980The keenest pangs to peacefulness, and tasteThe joys which mingled sense and spirit yield.Or he is formed for abjectness and woe,To grovel on the dunghill of his fears,To shrink at every sound, to quench the flame985Of natural love in sensualism, to knowThat hour as blessed when on his worthless daysThe frozen hand of Death shall set its seal,Yet fear the cure, though hating the disease.The one is man that shall hereafter be;990The other, man as vice has made him now.

'War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade,And, to those royal murderers, whose mean thronesAre bought by crimes of treachery and gore,995The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean.Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surroundTheir palaces, participate the crimesThat force defends, and from a nation's rageSecure the crown, which all the curses reach1000That famine, frenzy, woe and penury breathe.These are the hired bravos who defendThe tyrant's throne--the bullies of his fear:These are the sinks and channels of worst vice,The refuse of society, the dregs1005Of all that is most vile: their cold hearts blendDeceit with sternness, ignorance with pride,All that is mean and villanous, with rageWhich hopelessness of good, and self-contempt,Alone might kindle; they are decked in wealth,1010Honour and power, then are sent abroadTo do their work. The pestilence that stalksIn gloomy triumph through some eastern landIs less destroying. They cajole with gold,And promises of fame, the thoughtless youth1015Already crushed with servitude: he knowsHis wretchedness too late, and cherishesRepentance for his ruin, when his doomIs sealed in gold and blood!Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare1020The feet of Justice in the toils of law,Stand, ready to oppress the weaker still;And right or wrong will vindicate for gold,Sneering at public virtue, which beneathTheir pitiless tread lies torn and trampled, where1025Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

'Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,Without a hope, a passion, or a love,Who, through a life of luxury and lies,Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,1030Support the system whence their honours flow...They have three words:--well tyrants know their use,Well pay them for the loan, with usuryTorn from a bleeding world!--God, Hell, and Heaven.A vengeful, pitiless, and almighty fiend,1035Whose mercy is a nickname for the rageOf tameless tigers hungering for blood.Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,Where poisonous and undying worms prolongEternal misery to those hapless slaves1040Whose life has been a penance for its crimes.And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belieTheir human nature, quake, believe, and cringeBefore the mockeries of earthly power.

'These tools the tyrant tempers to his work,1045Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys,Omnipotent in wickedness: the whileYouth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely doesHis bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lendForce to the weakness of his trembling arm.1050

'They rise, they fall; one generation comesYielding its harvest to destruction's scythe.It fades, another blossoms: yet behold!Red glows the tyrant's stamp-mark on its bloom,Withering and cankering deep its passive prime.1055He has invented lying words and modes,Empty and vain as his own coreless heart;Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound,To lure the heedless victim to the toilsSpread round the valley of its paradise.1060

'Look to thyself, priest, conqueror, or prince!Whether thy trade is falsehood, and thy lustsDeep wallow in the earnings of the poor,With whom thy Master was:--or thou delight'stIn numbering o'er the myriads of thy slain,1065All misery weighing nothing in the scaleAgainst thy short-lived fame: or thou dost loadWith cowardice and crime the groaning land,A pomp-fed king. Look to thy wretched self!Ay, art thou not the veriest slave that e'er1070Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy daysDays of unsatisfying listlessness?Dost thou not cry, ere night's long rack is o'er,"When will the morning come?" Is not thy youthA vain and feverish dream of sensualism?1075Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease?Are not thy views of unregretted deathDrear, comfortless, and horrible? Thy mind,Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame,Incapable of judgement, hope, or love?1080And dost thou wish the errors to surviveThat bar thee from all sympathies of good,After the miserable interestThou hold'st in their protraction? When the graveHas swallowed up thy memory and thyself,1085Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earthTo twine its roots around thy coffined clay,Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb,That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die?

'Thus do the generations of the earth1090Go to the grave, and issue from the womb,Surviving still the imperishable changeThat renovates the world; even as the leavesWhich the keen frost-wind of the waning yearHas scattered on the forest soil, and heaped1095For many seasons there--though long they choke,Loading with loathsome rottenness the land,All germs of promise, yet when the tall treesFrom which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes,Lie level with the earth to moulder there,1100They fertilize the land they long deformed,Till from the breathing lawn a forest springsOf youth, integrity, and loveliness,Like that which gave it life, to spring and die.Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights1105The fairest feelings of the opening heart,Is destined to decay, whilst from the soilShall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,And judgement cease to wage unnatural warWith passion's unsubduable array.1110Twin-sister of religion, selfishness!Rival in crime and falsehood, aping allThe wanton horrors of her bloody play;Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,Shunning the light, and owning not its name,1115Compelled, by its deformity, to screen,With flimsy veil of justice and of right,Its unattractive lineaments, that scareAll, save the brood of ignorance: at onceThe cause and the effect of tyranny;1120Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile;Dead to all love but of its abjectness,With heart impassive by more noble powersThan unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;Despising its own miserable being,1125Which still it longs, yet fears to disenthrall.

'Hence commerce springs, the venal interchangeOf all that human art or nature yield;Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,And natural kindness hasten to supply1130From the full fountain of its boundless love,For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shadeNo solitary virtue dares to spring,But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand1135Scatter their withering curses, and unfoldThe doors of premature and violent death,To pining famine and full-fed disease,To all that shares the lot of human life,Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,1140That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind.

'Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,The signet of its all-enslaving powerUpon a shining ore, and called it gold:Before whose image bow the vulgar great,1145The vainly rich, the miserable proud,The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,And with blind feelings reverence the powerThat grinds them to the dust of misery.But in the temple of their hireling hearts1150Gold is a living god, and rules in scornAll earthly things but virtue.

'Since tyrants, by the sale of human life,Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fameTo their wide-wasting and insatiate pride,1155Success has sanctioned to a credulous worldThe ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war.His hosts of blind and unresisting dupesThe despot numbers; from his cabinetThese puppets of his schemes he moves at will,1160Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,Beneath a vulgar master, to performA task of cold and brutal drudgery;--Hardened to hope, insensible to fear,Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine,1165Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth!

'The harmony and happiness of manYields to the wealth of nations; that which liftsHis nature to the heaven of its pride,1170Is bartered for the poison of his soul;The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes,Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain,Withering all passion but of slavish fear,Extinguishing all free and generous love1175Of enterprise and daring, even the pulseThat fancy kindles in the beating heartTo mingle with sensation, it destroys,--Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self,The grovelling hope of interest and gold,1180Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemedEven by hypocrisy.And statesmen boastOf wealth! The wordy eloquence, that livesAfter the ruin of their hearts, can gild1185The bitter poison of a nation's woe,Can turn the worship of the servile mobTo their corrupt and glaring idol, Fame,From Virtue, trampled by its iron tread,Although its dazzling pedestal be raised1190Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field,With desolated dwellings smoking round.The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,To deeds of charitable intercourse,And bare fulfilment of the common laws1195Of decency and prejudice, confinesThe struggling nature of his human heart,Is duped by their cold sophistry; he shedsA passing tear perchance upon the wreckOf earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door1200The frightful waves are driven,--when his sonIs murdered by the tyrant, or religionDrives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,Whose life is misery, and fear, and care;Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil;1205Who ever hears his famished offspring's scream,Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gazeFor ever meets, and the proud rich man's eyeFlashing command, and the heart-breaking sceneOf thousands like himself;--he little heeds1210The rhetoric of tyranny; his hateIs quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scornThe vain and bitter mockery of words,Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds,And unrestrained but by the arm of power,1215That knows and dreads his enmity.

'The iron rod of Penury still compelsHer wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth,And poison, with unprofitable toil,A life too void of solace to confirm1220The very chains that bind him to his doom.Nature, impartial in munificence,Has gifted man with all-subduing will.Matter, with all its transitory shapes,Lies subjected and plastic at his feet,1225That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread.How many a rustic Milton has passed by,Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,In unremitting drudgery and care!How many a vulgar Cato has compelled1230His energies, no longer tameless then,To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!How many a Newton, to whose passive kenThose mighty spheres that gem infinityWere only specks of tinsel, fixed in Heaven1235To light the midnights of his native town!

'Yet every heart contains perfection's germ:The wisest of the sages of the earth,That ever from the stores of reason drewScience and truth, and virtue's dreadless tone,1240Were but a weak and inexperienced boy,Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbuedWith pure desire and universal love,Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain,Untainted passion, elevated will,1245Which Death (who even would linger long in aweWithin his noble presence, and beneathHis changeless eyebeam) might alone subdue.Him, every slave now dragging through the filthOf some corrupted city his sad life,1250Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,Blunting the keenness of his spiritual senseWith narrow schemings and unworthy cares,Or madly rushing through all violent crime,To move the deep stagnation of his soul,--1255Might imitate and equal.But mean lustHas bound its chains so tight around the earth,That all within it but the virtuous manIs venal: gold or fame will surely reach1260The price prefixed by selfishness, to allBut him of resolute and unchanging will;Whom, nor the plaudits of a servile crowd,Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury,Can bribe to yield his elevated soul1265To Tyranny or Falsehood, though they wieldWith blood-red hand the sceptre of the world.

'All things are sold: the very light of HeavenIs venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,The smallest and most despicable things1270That lurk in the abysses of the deep,All objects of our life, even life itself,And the poor pittance which the laws allowOf liberty, the fellowship of man,Those duties which his heart of human love1275Should urge him to perform instinctively,Are bought and sold as in a public martOf undisguising selfishness, that setsOn each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.Even love is sold; the solace of all woe1280Is turned to deadliest agony, old ageShivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,And youth's corrupted impulses prepareA life of horror from the blighting baneOf commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs1285From unenjoying sensualism, has filledAll human life with hydra-headed woes.

'Falsehood demands but gold to pay the pangsOf outraged conscience; for the slavish priestSets no great value on his hireling faith:1290A little passing pomp, some servile souls,Whom cowardice itself might safely chain,Or the spare mite of avarice could bribeTo deck the triumph of their languid zeal,Can make him minister to tyranny.1295More daring crime requires a loftier meed:Without a shudder, the slave-soldier lendsHis arm to murderous deeds, and steels his heart,When the dread eloquence of dying men,Low mingling on the lonely field of fame,1300Assails that nature, whose applause he sellsFor the gross blessings of a patriot mob,For the vile gratitude of heartless kings,And for a cold world's good word,--viler still!

'There is a nobler glory, which survives1305Until our being fades, and, solacingAll human care, accompanies its change;Deserts not virtue in the dungeon's gloom,And, in the precincts of the palace, guidesIts footsteps through that labyrinth of crime;1310Imbues his lineaments with dauntlessness,Even when, from Power's avenging hand, he takesIts sweetest, last and noblest title--death;--The consciousness of good, which neither gold,Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss1315Can purchase; but a life of resolute good,--Unalterable will, quenchless desireOf universal happiness, the heartThat beats with it in unison, the brain,Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change1320Reason's rich stores for its eternal weal.

'This commerce of sincerest virtue needsNo mediative signs of selfishness,No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,No balancings of prudence, cold and long;1325In just and equal measure all is weighed,One scale contains the sum of human weal,And one, the good man's heart.How vainly seekThe selfish for that happiness denied1330To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,Who covet power they know not how to use,And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,--Madly they frustrate still their own designs;1335And, where they hope that quiet to enjoyWhich virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,Pining regrets, and vain repentances,Disease, disgust, and lassitude, pervadeTheir valueless and miserable lives.1340

'But hoary-headed Selfishness has feltIts death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:A brighter morn awaits the human day,When every transfer of earth's natural giftsShall be a commerce of good words and works;1345When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,The fear of infamy, disease and woe,War with its million horrors, and fierce hellShall live but in the memory of Time,Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,1350Look back, and shudder at his younger years.'

All touch, all eye, all ear,The Spirit felt the Fairy's burning speech.O'er the thin texture of its frame,The varying periods painted changing glows,1355As on a summer even,When soul-enfolding music floats around,The stainless mirror of the lakeRe-images the eastern gloom,Mingling convulsively its purple hues1360With sunset's burnished gold.

Then thus the Spirit spoke:'It is a wild and miserable world!Thorny, and full of care,Which every fiend can make his prey at will.1365O Fairy! in the lapse of years,Is there no hope in store?Will yon vast suns roll onInterminably, still illumingThe night of so many wretched souls,1370And see no hope for them?Will not the universal Spirit e'erRevivify this withered limb of Heaven?'

The Fairy calmly smiledIn comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope1375Suffused the Spirit's lineaments.'Oh! rest thee tranquil; chase those fearful doubts,Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul,That sees the chains which bind it to its doom.Yes! crime and misery are in yonder earth,1380Falsehood, mistake, and lust;But the eternal worldContains at once the evil and the cure.Some eminent in virtue shall start up,Even in perversest time:1385The truths of their pure lips, that never die,Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreathOf ever-living flame,Until the monster sting itself to death.

'How sweet a scene will earth become!1390Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place,Symphonious with the planetary spheres;When man, with changeless Nature coalescing,Will undertake regeneration's work,When its ungenial poles no longer point1395To the red and baleful sunThat faintly twinkles there.

'Spirit! on yonder earth,Falsehood now triumphs; deadly powerHas fixed its seal upon the lip of truth!1400Madness and misery are there!The happiest is most wretched! Yet confide,Until pure health-drops, from the cup of joy,Fall like a dew of balm upon the world.Now, to the scene I show, in silence turn,1405And read the blood-stained charter of all woe,Which Nature soon, with re-creating hand,Will blot in mercy from the book of earth.How bold the flight of Passion's wandering wing,How swift the step of Reason's firmer tread,1410How calm and sweet the victories of life,How terrorless the triumph of the grave!How powerless were the mightiest monarch's arm,Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown!How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar!1415The weight of his exterminating curseHow light! and his affected charity,To suit the pressure of the changing times,What palpable deceit!--but for thy aid,Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,1420Who peoplest earth with demons, Hell with men,And Heaven with slaves!

'Thou taintest all thou look'st upon!--the stars,Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet,Were gods to the distempered playfulness1425Of thy untutored infancy: the trees,The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea,All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly,Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moonHer worshipper. Then thou becam'st, a boy,1430More daring in thy frenzies: every shape,Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild,Which, from sensation's relics, fancy cullsThe spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost,The genii of the elements, the powers1435That give a shape to Nature's varied works,Had life and place in the corrupt beliefOf thy blind heart: yet still thy youthful handsWere pure of human blood. Then manhood gaveIts strength and ardour to thy frenzied brain;1440Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene,Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride:Their everlasting and unchanging lawsReproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stoodstBaffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up1445The elements of all that thou didst know;The changing seasons, winter's leafless reign,The budding of the Heaven-breathing trees,The eternal orbs that beautify the night,The sunrise, and the setting of the moon,1450Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease,And all their causes, to an abstract pointConverging, thou didst bend and called it God!The self-sufficing, the omnipotent,The merciful, and the avenging God!1455Who, prototype of human misrule, sitsHigh in Heaven's realm, upon a golden throne,Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work,Hell, gapes for ever for the unhappy slavesOf fate, whom He created, in his sport,1460To triumph in their torments when they fell!Earth heard the name; Earth trembled, as the smokeOf His revenge ascended up to Heaven,Blotting the constellations; and the criesOf millions, butchered in sweet confidence1465And unsuspecting peace, even when the bondsOf safety were confirmed by wordy oathsSworn in His dreadful name, rung through the land;Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear,And thou didst laugh to hear the mother's shriek1470Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steelFelt cold in her torn entrails!

'Religion! thou wert then in manhood's prime:But age crept on: one God would not sufficeFor senile puerility; thou framedst1475A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glutThy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiendThy wickedness had pictured might affordA plea for sating the unnatural thirstFor murder, rapine, violence, and crime,1480That still consumed thy being, even whenThou heardst the step of Fate;--that flames might lightThy funeral scene, and the shrill horrent shrieksOf parents dying on the pile that burnedTo light their children to thy paths, the roar1485Of the encircling flames, the exulting criesOf thine apostles, loud commingling there,Might sate thine hungry earEven on the bed of death!

'But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs;1490Thou art descending to the darksome grave,Unhonoured and unpitied, but by thoseWhose pride is passing by like thine, and sheds,Like thine, a glare that fades before the sunOf truth, and shines but in the dreadful night1495That long has lowered above the ruined world.

'Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffusedA Spirit of activity and life,That knows no term, cessation, or decay;1500That fades not when the lamp of earthly life,Extinguished in the dampness of the grave,Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babeIn the dim newness of its being feelsThe impulses of sublunary things,1505And all is wonder to unpractised sense:But, active, steadfast, and eternal, stillGuides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars,Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves,Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease;1510And in the storm of change, that ceaselesslyRolls round the eternal universe, and shakesIts undecaying battlement, presides,Apportioning with irresistible lawThe place each spring of its machine shall fill;1515So that when waves on waves tumultuous heapConfusion to the clouds, and fiercely drivenHeaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords,Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner,Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock,1520All seems unlinked contingency and chance:No atom of this turbulence fulfilsA vague and unnecessitated task,Or acts but as it must and ought to act.Even the minutest molecule of light,1525That in an April sunbeam's fleeting glowFulfils its destined, though invisible work,The universal Spirit guides; nor less,When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,Has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield,1530That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves,And call the sad work glory, does it ruleAll passions: not a thought, a will, an act,No working of the tyrant's moody mind,Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast1535Their servitude, to hide the shame they feel,Nor the events enchaining every will,That from the depths of unrecorded timeHave drawn all-influencing virtue, passUnrecognized, or unforeseen by thee,1540Soul of the Universe! eternal springOf life and death, of happiness and woe,Of all that chequers the phantasmal sceneThat floats before our eyes in wavering light,Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,1545Whose chains and massy wallsWe feel, but cannot see.

'Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power,Necessity! thou mother of the world!Unlike the God of human error, thou1550Requir'st no prayers or praises; the capriceOf man's weak will belongs no more to theeThan do the changeful passions of his breastTo thy unvarying harmony: the slave,Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world,1555And the good man, who lifts, with virtuous pride,His being, in the sight of happiness,That springs from his own works; the poison-treeBeneath whose shade all life is withered up,And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords1560A temple where the vows of happy loveAre registered, are equal in thy sight:No love, no hate thou cherishest; revengeAnd favouritism, and worst desire of fameThou know'st not: all that the wide world contains1565Are but thy passive instruments, and thouRegard'st them all with an impartial eye,Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,Because thou hast not human sense,Because thou art not human mind.1570

'Yes! when the sweeping storm of timeHas sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanesAnd broken altars of the almighty FiendWhose name usurps thy honours, and the bloodThrough centuries clotted there, has floated down1575The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou liveUnchangeable! A shrine is raised to thee,Which, nor the tempest-breath of time,Nor the interminable flood,Over earth's slight pageant rolling,1580Availeth to destroy,--.The sensitive extension of the world.That wondrous and eternal fane,Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,To do the will of strong necessity,1585And life, in multitudinous shapes,Still pressing forward where no term can be,Like hungry and unresting flameCurls round the eternal columns of its strength.'

SPIRIT:1590'I was an infant when my mother wentTo see an atheist burned. She took me there:The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;The multitude was gazing silently;And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,1595Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth:The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob1600Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept."Weep not, child!" cried my mother, "for that manHas said, There is no God."'

FAIRY:'There is no God!1605Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed:Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race,His ceaseless generations tell their tale;Let every part depending on the chainThat links it to the whole, point to the hand1610That grasps its term! let every seed that fallsIn silent eloquence unfold its storeOf argument; infinity within,Infinity without, belie creation;The exterminable spirit it contains1615Is nature's only God; but human prideIs skilful to invent most serious namesTo hide its ignorance.The name of GodHas fenced about all crime with holiness,1620Himself the creature of His worshippers,Whose names and attributes and passions change,Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord,Even with the human dupes who build His shrines,Still serving o'er the war-polluted world1625For desolation's watchword; whether hostsStain His death-blushing chariot-wheels, as onTriumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raiseA sacred hymn to mingle with the groans;Or countless partners of His power divide1630His tyranny to weakness; or the smokeOf burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy,Horribly massacred, ascend to HeavenIn honour of His name; or, last and worst,1635Earth groans beneath religion's iron age,And priests dare babble of a God of peace,Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,Murdering the while, uprooting every germOf truth, exterminating, spoiling all,1640Making the earth a slaughter-house!

'O Spirit! through the senseBy which thy inner nature was apprisedOf outward shows, vague dreams have rolled,And varied reminiscences have waked1645Tablets that never fade;All things have been imprinted there,The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky,Even the unshapeliest lineamentsOf wild and fleeting visions1650Have left a record thereTo testify of earth.

'These are my empire, for to me is givenThe wonders of the human world to keep,And Fancy's thin creations to endow1655With manner, being, and reality;Therefore a wondrous phantom, from the dreamsOf human error's dense and purblind faith,I will evoke, to meet thy questioning.Ahasuerus, rise!'1660

A strange and woe-worn wightArose beside the battlement,And stood unmoving there.His inessential figure cast no shadeUpon the golden floor;1665His port and mien bore mark of many years,And chronicles of untold ancientnessWere legible within his beamless eye:Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth;Freshness and vigour knit his manly frame;1670The wisdom of old age was mingled thereWith youth's primaeval dauntlessness;And inexpressible woe,Chastened by fearless resignation, gaveAn awful grace to his all-speaking brow.1675

SPIRIT:'Is there a God?'

AHASUERUS:'Is there a God!--ay, an almighty God,And vengeful as almighty! Once His voice1680Was heard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound;The fiery-visaged firmament expressedAbhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawnedTo swallow all the dauntless and the goodThat dared to hurl defiance at His throne,1685Girt as it was with power. None but slavesSurvived,--cold-blooded slaves, who did the workOf tyrannous omnipotence; whose soulsNo honest indignation ever urgedTo elevated daring, to one deed1690Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.These slaves built temples for the omnipotent Fiend,Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smokedWith human blood, and hideous paeans rungThrough all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard1695His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and artsHad raised him to his eminence in power,Accomplice of omnipotence in crime,And confidant of the all-knowing one.These were Jehovah's words:--1700

'From an eternity of idlenessI, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made earthFrom nothing; rested, and created man:I placed him in a Paradise, and therePlanted the tree of evil, so that he1705Might eat and perish, and My soul procureWherewith to sate its malice, and to turn,Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth,All misery to My fame. The race of menChosen to My honour, with impunity1710May sate the lusts I planted in their heart.Here I command thee hence to lead them on,Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troopsWade on the promised soil through woman's blood,And make My name be dreaded through the land.1715Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woeShall be the doom of their eternal souls,With every soul on this ungrateful earth,Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong,--even allShall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge1720(Which you, to men, call justice) of their God.'

The murderer's browQuivered with horror.'God omnipotent,Is there no mercy? must our punishment1725Be endless? will long ages roll away,And see no term? Oh! wherefore hast Thou madeIn mockery and wrath this evil earth?Mercy becomes the powerful--be but just:O God! repent and save.'1730

'One way remains:I will beget a Son, and He shall bearThe sins of all the world; He shall ariseIn an unnoticed corner of the earth,And there shall die upon a cross, and purge1735The universal crime; so that the fewOn whom My grace descends, those who are markedAs vessels to the honour of their God,May credit this strange sacrifice, and saveTheir souls alive: millions shall live and die,1740Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name,But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave.Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale,Such as the nurses frighten babes withal:These in a gulf of anguish and of flame1745Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,Even on their beds of torment, where they howl,My honour, and the justice of their doom.What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts1750Of purity, with radiant genius bright,Or lit with human reason's earthly ray?Many are called, but few will I elect.Do thou My bidding, Moses!'Even the murderer's cheek1755Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lipsScarce faintly uttered--'O almighty One,I tremble and obey!'

'O Spirit! centuries have set their sealOn this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain,1760Since the Incarnate came: humbly He came,Veiling His horrible Godhead in the shapeOf man, scorned by the world, His name unheard,Save by the rabble of His native town,Even as a parish demagogue. He led1765The crowd; He taught them justice, truth, and peace,In semblance; but He lit within their soulsThe quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the swordHe brought on earth to satiate with the bloodOf truth and freedom His malignant soul.1770At length His mortal frame was led to death.I stood beside Him: on the torturing crossNo pain assailed His unterrestrial sense;And yet He groaned. Indignantly I summedThe massacres and miseries which His name1775Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,"Go! Go!" in mockery.A smile of godlike malice reillumedHis fading lineaments.--"I go," He cried,"But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth1780Eternally."--The dampness of the graveBathed my imperishable front. I fell,And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil.When I awoke Hell burned within my brain,Which staggered on its seat; for all around1785The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them,And in their various attitudes of deathMy murdered children's mute and eyeless skullsGlared ghastily upon me.1790But my soul,From sight and sense of the polluting woeOf tyranny, had long learned to preferHell's freedom to the servitude of Heaven.Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began1795My lonely and unending pilgrimage,Resolved to wage unweariable warWith my almighty Tyrant, and to hurlDefiance at His impotence to harmBeyond the curse I bore. The very hand1800That barred my passage to the peaceful graveHas crushed the earth to misery, and givenIts empire to the chosen of His slaves.These have I seen, even from the earliest dawnOf weak, unstable and precarious power,1805Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;So, when they turned but from the massacreOf unoffending infidels, to quenchTheir thirst for ruin in the very bloodThat flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal1810Froze every human feeling, as the wifeSheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel,Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stoodOpposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,1815Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught, waged,Drunk from the winepress of the Almighty's wrath;Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,Pointed to victory! When the fray was done,No remnant of the exterminated faith1820Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.

'Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheatheThe sword of His revenge, when grace descended,1825Confirming all unnatural impulses,To sanctify their desolating deeds;And frantic priests waved the ill-omened crossO'er the unhappy earth: then shone the sunOn showers of gore from the upflashing steel1830Of safe assassination, and all crimeMade stingless by the Spirits of the Lord,And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.'Spirit, no year of my eventful beingHas passed unstained by crime and misery,1835Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked His slavesWith tongues whose lies are venomous, beguileThe insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was redWith murder, feign to stretch the other outFor brotherhood and peace; and that they now1840Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deedsAre marked with all the narrowness and crimeThat Freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise,Reason may claim our gratitude, who nowEstablishing the imperishable throne1845Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vainThe unprevailing malice of my Foe,Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,Adds impotent eternities to pain,Whilst keenest disappointment racks His breast1850To see the smiles of peace around them play,To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.

'Thus have I stood,--through a wild waste of yearsStruggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,1855Mocking my powerless Tyrant's horrible curseWith stubborn and unalterable will,Even as a giant oak, which Heaven's fierce flameHad scathed in the wilderness, to standA monument of fadeless ruin there;1860Yet peacefully and movelessly it bravesThe midnight conflict of the wintry storm,As in the sunlight's calm it spreadsIts worn and withered arms on highTo meet the quiet of a summer's noon.'1865

The Fairy waved her wand:Ahasuerus fledFast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,Flee from the morning beam:1870The matter of which dreams are madeNot more endowed with actual lifeThan this phantasmal portraitureOf wandering human thought.

THE FAIRY:1875'The Present and the Past thou hast beheld:It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learnThe secrets of the Future.--Time!Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,1880And from the cradles of eternity,Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleepBy the deep murmuring stream of passing things,Tear thou that gloomy shroud.--Spirit, beholdThy glorious destiny!'1885

Joy to the Spirit came.Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:Earth was no longer Hell;Love, freedom, health, had given1890Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,And all its pulses beatSymphonious to the planetary spheres:Then dulcet music swelledConcordant with the life-strings of the soul;1895It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,Catching new life from transitory death,--Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering seaAnd dies on the creation of its breath,1900And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits:Was the pure stream of feelingThat sprung from these sweet notes,And o'er the Spirit's human sympathiesWith mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.1905

Joy to the Spirit came,--Such joy as when a lover seesThe chosen of his soul in happiness,And witnesses her peaceWhose woe to him were bitterer than death,1910Sees her unfaded cheekGlow mantling in first luxury of health,Thrills with her lovely eyes,Which like two stars amid the heaving mainSparkle through liquid bliss.1915

Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:'I will not call the ghost of ages goneTo unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;The present now is past,And those events that desolate the earth1920Have faded from the memory of Time,Who dares not give reality to thatWhose being I annul. To me is givenThe wonders of the human world to keep,Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity1925Exposes now its treasure; let the sightRenew and strengthen all thy failing hope.O human Spirit! spur thee to the goalWhere virtue fixes universal peace,And midst the ebb and flow of human things,1930Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,A lighthouse o'er the wild of dreary waves.

'The habitable earth is full of bliss;Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurledBy everlasting snowstorms round the poles,1935Where matter dared not vegetate or live,But ceaseless frost round the vast solitudeBound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy islesRuffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls1940Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweetTo murmur through the Heaven-breathing grovesAnd melodize with man's blest nature there.

'Those deserts of immeasurable sand,1945Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowedA bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's loveBroke on the sultry silentness alone,Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,1950Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;And where the startled wilderness beheldA savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,A tigress sating with the flesh of lambsThe unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,1955Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smilesTo see a babe before his mother's door,Sharing his morning's meal1960With the green and golden basiliskThat comes to lick his feet.

'Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sailHas seen above the illimitable plain,Morning on night, and night on morning rise,1965Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spreadIts shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,Where the loud roarings of the tempest-wavesSo long have mingled with the gusty windIn melancholy loneliness, and swept1970The desert of those ocean solitudes,But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,Now to the sweet and many-mingling soundsOf kindliest human impulses respond.1975Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,1980To meet the kisses of the flow'rets there.

'All things are recreated, and the flameOf consentaneous love inspires all life:The fertile bosom of the earth gives suckTo myriads, who still grow beneath her care,1985Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:The balmy breathings of the wind inhaleHer virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream:1990No storms deform the beaming brow of Heaven,Nor scatter in the freshness of its prideThe foliage of the ever-verdant trees;But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace,1995Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring,Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruitReflects its tint, and blushes into love.

'The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:There might you see him sporting in the sun2000Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,His teeth are harmless, custom's force has madeHis nature as the nature of a lamb.Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting banePoisons no more the pleasure it bestows:2005All bitterness is past; the cup of joyUnmingled mantles to the goblet's brim,And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

'But chief, ambiguous Man, he that can knowMore misery, and dream more joy than all;2010Whose keen sensations thrill within his breastTo mingle with a loftier instinct there,Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;Who stands amid the ever-varying world,2015The burthen or the glory of the earth;He chief perceives the change, his being notesThe gradual renovation, and definesEach movement of its progress on his mind.

'Man, where the gloom of the long polar night2020Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frostBasks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,2025Insensible to courage, truth, or love,His stunted stature and imbecile frame,Marked him for some abortion of the earth,Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,Whose habits and enjoyments were his own:2030His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,Apprised him ever of the joyless lengthWhich his short being's wretchedness had reached;His death a pang which famine, cold and toil2035Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital sparkClung to the body stubbornly, had brought:All was inflicted here that Earth's revengeCould wreak on the infringers of her law;One curse alone was spared--the name of God.2040

'Nor where the tropics bound the realms of dayWith a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphereScattered the seeds of pestilence, and fedUnnatural vegetation, where the land2045Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,Was Man a nobler being; slaveryHad crushed him to his country's bloodstained dust;Or he was bartered for the fame of power,Which all internal impulses destroying,2050Makes human will an article of trade;Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,And dragged to distant isles, where to the soundOf the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the workOf all-polluting luxury and wealth,2055Which doubly visits on the tyrants' headsThe long-protracted fulness of their woe;Or he was led to legal butchery,To turn to worms beneath that burning sun,Where kings first leagued against the rights of men,2060And priests first traded with the name of God.

'Even where the milder zone afforded ManA seeming shelter, yet contagion there,Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late2065Availed to arrest its progress, or createThat peace which first in bloodless victory wavedHer snowy standard o'er this favoured clime:There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,The mimic of surrounding misery,2070The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.'Here now the human being stands adorningThis loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;Blessed from his birth with all bland impulses,2075Which gently in his noble bosom wakeAll kindly passions and all pure desires.Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuingWhich from the exhaustless lore of human wealDawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise2080In time-destroying infiniteness, giftWith self-enshrined eternity, that mocksThe unprevailing hoariness of age,And man, once fleeting o'er the transient sceneSwift as an unremembered vision, stands2085Immortal upon earth: no longer nowHe slays the lamb that looks him in the face,And horribly devours his mangled flesh,Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,2090All evil passions, and all vain belief,Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.No longer now the winged habitants,That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,--2095Flee from the form of man; but gather round,And prune their sunny feathers on the handsWhich little children stretch in friendly sportTowards these dreadless partners of their play.All things are void of terror: Man has lost2100His terrible prerogative, and standsAn equal amidst equals: happinessAnd science dawn though late upon the earth;Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,2105Reason and passion cease to combat there;Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extendTheir all-subduing energies, and wieldThe sceptre of a vast dominion there;Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends2110Its force to the omnipotence of mind,Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truthTo decorate its Paradise of peace.'

'O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!To which those restless souls that ceaselessly2115Throng through the human universe, aspire;Thou consummation of all mortal hope!Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,Verge to one point and blend for ever there:2120Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

'Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,2125And dim forebodings of thy lovelinessHaunting the human heart, have there entwinedThose rooted hopes of some sweet place of blissWhere friends and lovers meet to part no more.Thou art the end of all desire and will,2130The product of all action; and the soulsThat by the paths of an aspiring changeHave reached thy haven of perpetual peace,There rest from the eternity of toilThat framed the fabric of thy perfectness.2135

'Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride,So long had ruled the world, that nations fellBeneath his silent footstep. Pyramids,That for millenniums had withstood the tide2140Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sandAcross that desert where their stones survivedThe name of him whose pride had heaped them there.Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,Was but the mushroom of a summer day,2145That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust:Time was the king of earth: all things gave wayBefore him, but the fixed and virtuous will,The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.2150

'Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love;Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene,Till from its native Heaven they rolled away:First, Crime triumphant o'er all hope careeredUnblushing, undisguising, bold and strong;2155Whilst Falsehood, tricked in Virtue's attributes,Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,Till done by her own venomous sting to death,She left the moral world without a law,No longer fettering Passion's fearless wing,--2160Nor searing Reason with the brand of God.Then steadily the happy ferment worked;Reason was free; and wild though Passion wentThrough tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads,Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers,2165Yet like the bee returning to her queen,She bound the sweetest on her sister's brow,Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child,No longer trembling at the broken rod.

'Mild was the slow necessity of death:2170The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,Without a groan, almost without a fear,Calm as a voyager to some distant land,And full of wonder, full of hope as he.The deadly germs of languor and disease2175Died in the human frame, and PurityBlessed with all gifts her earthly worshippers.How vigorous then the athletic form of age!How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, nor care,2180Had stamped the seal of gray deformityOn all the mingling lineaments of time.How lovely the intrepid front of youth!Which meek-eyed courage decked with freshest grace;--Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name,2185And elevated will, that journeyed onThrough life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness,With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand.

'Then, that sweet bondage which is Freedom's self,And rivets with sensation's softest tie2190The kindred sympathies of human souls,Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:Those delicate and timid impulsesIn Nature's primal modesty arose,And with undoubted confidence disclosed2195The growing longings of its dawning love,Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.No longer prostitution's venomed bane2200Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;Woman and man, in confidence and love,Equal and free and pure together trodThe mountain-paths of virtue, which no moreWere stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet.2205

'Then, where, through distant ages, long in prideThe palace of the monarch-slave had mockedFamine's faint groan, and Penury's silent tear,A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threwYear after year their stones upon the field,2210Wakening a lonely echo; and the leavesOf the old thorn, that on the topmost towerUsurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shookIn the stern storm that swayed the topmost towerAnd whispered strange tales in the Whirlwind's ear.2215'Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aislesThe melancholy winds a death-dirge sung:It were a sight of awfulness to seeThe works of faith and slavery, so vast,So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal!2220Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.A thousand mourners deck the pomp of deathTo-day, the breathing marble glows aboveTo decorate its memory, and tonguesAre busy of its life: to-morrow, worms2225In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

'Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,Fearless and free the ruddy children played,Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent browsWith the green ivy and the red wallflower,2230That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,There rusted amid heaps of broken stoneThat mingled slowly with their native earth:There the broad beam of day, which feebly once2235Lighted the cheek of lean CaptivityWith a pale and sickly glare, then freely shoneOn the pure smiles of infant playfulness:No more the shuddering voice of hoarse DespairPealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes2240Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birdsAnd merriment were resonant around.

'These ruins soon left not a wreck behind:Their elements, wide scattered o'er the globe,To happier shapes were moulded, and became2245Ministrant to all blissful impulses:Thus human things were perfected, and earth,Even as a child beneath its mother's love,Was strengthened in all excellence, and grewFairer and nobler with each passing year.2250

'Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the sceneCloses in steadfast darkness, and the pastFades from our charmed sight. My task is done:Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own,With all the fear and all the hope they bring.2255My spells are passed: the present now recurs.Ah me! a pathless wilderness remainsYet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand.

'Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue2260The gradual paths of an aspiring change:For birth and life and death, and that strange stateBefore the naked soul has found its home,All tend to perfect happiness, and urgeThe restless wheels of being on their way,2265Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:For birth but wakes the spirit to the senseOf outward shows, whose unexperienced shapeNew modes of passion to its frame may lend;2270Life is its state of action, and the storeOf all events is aggregated thereThat variegate the eternal universe;Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,That leads to azure isles and beaming skies2275And happy regions of eternal hope.Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on:Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,Yet Spring's awakening breath will woo the earth,2280To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.

'Fear not then, Spirit, Death's disrobing hand,So welcome when the tyrant is awake,2285So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch burns;'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.Death is no foe to Virtue: earth has seenLove's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,2290Mingling with Freedom's fadeless laurels there,And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.Are there not hopes within thee, which this sceneOf linked and gradual being has confirmed?Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still,2295When, to the moonlight walk by Henry led,Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,Listening supinely to a bigot's creed,Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod,2300Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?Never: but bravely bearing on, thy willIs destined an eternal war to wageWith tyranny and falsehood, and uprootThe germs of misery from the human heart.2305Thine is the hand whose piety would sootheThe thorny pillow of unhappy crime,Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease:Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy2310Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,When fenced by power and master of the world.Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,Free from heart-withering custom's cold control,Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.2315Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,And therefore art thou worthy of the boonWhich thou hast now received: Virtue shall keepThy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,And many days of beaming hope shall bless2320Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.Go, happy one, and give that bosom joyWhose sleepless spirit waits to catchLight, life and rapture from thy smile.'

The Fairy waves her wand of charm.2325Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,That rolled beside the battlement,Bending her beamy eyes in thankful ness.Again the enchanted steeds were yoked,Again the burning wheels inflame2330The steep descent of Heaven's untrodden way.Fast and far the chariot flew:The vast and fiery globes that rolledAround the Fairy's palace-gateLessened by slow degrees and soon appeared2335Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbsThat there attendant on the solar powerWith borrowed light pursued their narrower way.

Earth floated then below:The chariot paused a moment there;2340The Spirit then descended:The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done,Unfurled their pinions to the winds of Heaven.

The Body and the Soul united then,2345A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame:Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:She looked around in wonder and beheldHenry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,2350Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,And the bright beaming starsThat through the casement shone.