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Through various parts our glorious story runs ;
Time gives the preface, endless age unrolls
The volume (ne'er unrolled!) of human fate.
This earth and skies1 already have proclaimed.
The world's a prophecy of worlds to come;
And who, what God foretels (who speaks in things,
Still louder than in words) shall dare deny?
If nature's arguments appear too weak,
Turn a new leaf, and stronger read in man.
If man sleeps on, untaught by what he sees,
Can he prove infidel to what he feels?
He, whose blind thought futurity denies,
Unconscious bears, Bellerophon! like thee,
His own indictment; he condemns himself;
Who reads his bosom, reads immortal life;
Or, nature, there, imposing on her sons,
Has written fables; man was made a lie.
Why discontent for ever harboured there?
Incurable consumption of our peace!
Resolve me, why, the cottager, and king,
He, whom sea-sever'd realms obey, and he
Who steals his whole dominion from the waste,
Repelling winter blasts with mud and straw,
Disquieted alike, draw sigh for sigh,
In fate so distant, in complaint so near?

Is it, that things terrestrial can't content!
Deep in rich pasture will thy flocks complain?
Not so; but to their master is denied
To share their sweet serene. Man, ill at ease
In this, not his own place, this foreign field,
Where nature fodders him with other food,
Than was ordained his cravings to suffice,
Poor in abundance, famished at a feast,
Sighs on for something more, when most enjoyed.
Is heaven then kinder to thy flocks than thee?
Not so; thy pasture richer, but remote;

In part remote; for that remoter part

Man bleats from instinct, though perhaps, debauched
By sense, his reason sleeps, nor dreams the cause.
The cause how obvious, when his reason wakes!
His grief is but his grandeur in disguise;

And discontent is immortality.

Shall sons of ether, shall the blood of heaven, 1 Night VI.

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Were man to live coeval with the sun,
The patriarch-pupil would be learning still;
Yet, dying, leave his lesson half unlearned.
P. 107

Set up their hopes on earth, and stable here,
With brutal acquiescence in the mire?
Lorenzo! no! they shall be nobly pain'd;
The glorious foreigners, distressed, shall sigh
On thrones; and thou congratulate the sigh:
Man's misery declares him born for bliss;
His anxious heart asserts the truth I sing,
And gives the sceptic in his head the lie.

Our heads, our hearts, our passions, and our powers,
Speak the same language; call us to the skies:
Unripened these in this inclement clime,
Scarce rise above conjecture, and mistake;
And for this land of trifles those too strong
Tumultuous rise, and tempest human life :
What prize on earth can pay us for the storm?
Meet objects for our passions heaven ordained,
Objects that challenge all their fire, and leave
No fault, but in defect: blest Heaven! avert
A bounded ardour for unbounded bliss!
O for a bliss unbounded! far beneath
A soul immortal, is a mortal joy.
Nor are our powers to perish immature;
But, after feeble effort here, beneath
A brighter sun, and in a nobler soil,
Transplanted from this sublunary bed,
Shall flourish fair, and put forth all their bloom.
Reason progressive, instinct is complete;
Swift instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.
Brutes soon their zenith reach; their little all
Flows in at once; in ages they no more
Could know, or do, or covet, or enjoy.
Were man to live coeval with the sun,

The patriarch-pupil would be learning still;
Yet, dying, leave his lesson half unlearned.

Men perish in advance, as if the sun

Should set ere noon, in eastern oceans drowned;
If fit, with dim, illustrious to compare,

The sun's meridian with the soul of man.

To man, why, stepdame nature! so severe ?
Why thrown aside thy master-piece half-wrought,
While meaner efforts thy last hand enjoy?
Or, if abortively, poor man must die,

Nor reach, what reach he might, why die in dread?
Why cursed with foresight? wise to misery?

Why of his proud prerogative the prey?
Why less pre-eminent in rank, than pain?
His immortality alone can tell ;

Full ample fund to balance all amiss,
And turn the scale in favour of the just!
His immortality alone can solve
The darkest of enigmas, human hope;
Of all the darkest, if at death we die.
Hope, eager hope, the assassin of our joy,
All present blessings treading under foot,
Is scarce a milder tyrant than despair.
With no past toils content, still planting new,
Hope turns us o'er to death alone for ease.
Possession, why more tasteless than pursuit ?
Why is a wish far dearer than a crown?
That wish accomplished, why, the grave of bliss?
Because, in the great future buried deep,
Beyond our plans of empire, and renown,
Lies all that man with ardour should pursue;
And he who made him, bent him to the right.
Man's heart the Almighty to the future sets,
By secret and inviolable springs;

And makes his hope his sublunary joy.

Man's heart eats all things, and is hungry still;
"More, more!" the glutton cries: for something new
So rages appetite, if man can't mount,

He will descend. He starves on the possessed.
Hence, the world's master, from ambition's spire,
In Caprea plunged; and dived beneath the brute
In that rank sty why wallowed empire's son
Supreme? because he could no higher fly;
His riot was ambition in despair.

Old Rome consulted birds; Lorenzo! thou
With more success, the flight of hope survey;
Of restless hope, for ever on the wing.
High-perched o'er ev'ry thought that falcon sits,
To fly at all that rises in her sight;
And never stooping, but to mount again
Next moment, she betrays her aim's mistake,
And owns her quarry lodged beyond the grave.
There should it fail us (it must fail us there,
If being fails) more mournful riddles rise,
And virtue vies with hope in mystery.
Why virtue? where its praise, its being, fled?

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