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Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes,
And in the blushing face of day

Exposed its shameful glory.

Oh! many a widow, many an orphan, cursed
The building of that fane; and many a father,
Worn out with toil and slavery, implored

The

poor man's God to sweep it from the earth,
And spare his children the detested task
Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning
The choicest days of life,

To soothe a dotard's vanity.

There an inhuman and uncultured race

Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God.
They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb
The unborn child,-old age and infancy

Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms

Left not a soul to breathe. Oh ! they were fiends!
But what was he who taught them that the God
Of nature and benevolence had given

A special sanction to the trade of blood?

His name and theirs are fading; and the tales

Of this barbarian nation, which imposture

Recites till terror credits, are pursuing
Itself into forgetfulness.

"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

Now 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,
Remembered now in sadness.

But oh! how much more changed,
How gloomier is the contrast

Of human nature there!

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,

A coward and a fool, spreads death around—
Then, shuddering, meets his own.

Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,
A cowled and hypocritical monk
Prays, curses, and deceives.

"Spirit! ten thousand years
Have scarcely passed away

Since, in the waste where now the savage drinks
His enemy's blood, and, aping Europe's sons,
Wakes the unholy song of war,

Arose a stately city,

Metropolis of the western continent.

There now the mossy column-stone,
Indented by Time's unrelaxing grasp,
Which once appeared to brave
All save its country's ruin;
There the wide forest scene,

Rude in the uncultivated loveliness

Of gardens long run wild,

Seems, to the unwilling sojourner whose steps
Chance in that desert has delayed,

Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.
Yet once it was the busiest haunt

Whither, as to a common centre, flocked
Strangers, and ships, and merchandize :
Once peace and freedom blessed
The 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 know

That they alone can give the bliss

Worthy a soul that claims

Its kindred with eternity.

"There's not one atom of yon earth

But once was living man;
Nor the minutest drop of rain
That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,

But flowed in human veins :
And from the burning plains
Where Libyan monsters yell,
From the most gloomy glens

Of Greenland's sunless clime,
To where the golden fields
Of fertile England spread
Their harvest to the day,
Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.

"How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things
To whom the fragile blade of grass
That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon

Is an unbounded world,

I tell thee that those viewless beings
Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,-
Think, feel, and live, like man;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the laws
Ruling their moral state;

And the minutest throb

That through their frame diffuses

The slightest, faintest motion,

Is fixed and indispensable

As the majestic laws

That rule yon rolling orbs."

The Fairy paused. The Spirit,

In ecstacy of admiration, felt

All knowledge of the past revived. The events
Of old and wondrous times,

Which dim tradition interruptedly

Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded
In just perspective to the view,
Yet dim from their infinitude.

The Spirit seemed to stand

High on an isolated pinnacle ;
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around

Nature's unchanging harmony.

III.

"FAIRY!" the Spirit said,
And on the Queen of Spells
Fixed her etherial eyes,

"I thank thee. Thou hast given

A boon which I will not resign, and taught
A lesson not to be unlearned. I know
The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive

Experience from his folly:

For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul

Requires no other heaven.

Fairy. Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!
Much yet remains unscanned.
Thou know'st how great is man,
Thou know'st his imbecility :-

Yet learn thou what he is;

Yet learn the lofty destiny

Which restless Time prepares
For every living soul.

Behold a gorgeous palace that amid

Yon populous city rears its thousand towers,
And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops
Of sentinels, in stern and silent ranks,
Encompass it around. The dweller there
Cannot be free and happy; hear'st thou not
The curses of the fatherless, the groans

Of those who have no friend? He passes on.

The King, the wearer of a gilded chain

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool

PH

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave

Even to the basest appetites-that man

Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles

At the deep curses which the destitute

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan

But for those morsels which his wantonness

Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save

5

All that they love from famine. When he hears
The tale of horror, to some ready-made face
Of hypocritical assent he turns,

Smothering the glow of shame that, spite of him,
Flushes his bloated cheek.

Now to the meal

Of silence, grandeur, and excess, he drags

His palled unwilling appetite. If gold
Gleaming around, and numerous viands culled
From every clime, could force the loathing sense
To overcome satiety,—if wealth

The spring it draws from poisons not,

-or vice,
Unfeeling stubborn vice, converteth not
Its food to deadliest venom; then that king
Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils
His unforced task, when he returns at even,
And by the blazing faggot meets again
Her welcome for whom all his toil is sped,
Tastes not a sweeter meal.

Behold him now

Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brain Reels dizzily awhile: but ah! too soon

The slumber of intemperance subsides,

And conscience, that undying serpent, calls

Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task.

Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye— Oh! mark that deadly visage.

King.

Oh! must this last for ever?

I wish yet fear to clasp thee!

No cessation!

Awful Death,

Not one moment

Of dreamless sleep! O dear and blessed Peace!
Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity

In penury and dungeons? Wherefore lurkest
With danger, death, and solitude, yet shunn'st
The palace I have built thee? Sacred Peace!
Oh visit me but once, and pitying shed
One drop of balm upon my withered soul !

Fairy. Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart, And Peace defileth not her snowy robes

In such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters ;