I wish yet fear to clasp thee !-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.
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; His slumbers are but varied agonies:
They prey like scorpions on the springs of life. There needeth not the hell that bigots frame To punish those who err: earth in itself Contains at once the evil and the cure;
And all-sufficing nature can chastise
Those who transgress her law;-she only knows How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits.
That this poor wretch should pride him in his woe? Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug
The scorpion that consumes him? Is it strange That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns, Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured Within a splendid prison, whose stern bounds Shut him from all that's good or dear on earth, His soul asserts not its humanity?
That man's mild nature rises not in war Against a king's employ? No-'tis not strange He, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives, Just as his father did: the unconquered powers Of precedent and custom interpose Between a king and virtue. Stranger yet, To those who know not nature, nor deduce The future from the present, it may seem
That not one slave, who suffers from the crimes Of this unnatural being; not one wretch,
Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bed Is earth's unpitying bosom, rears an arm To dash him from his throne!
That, basking in the sunshine of a court, Fatten on corruption, what are they? -The drones of the community; they feed
On the mechanic's labour: the starved hind
For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield flink
Its unshared harvests; and yon squallid form, Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes
A sunless life in the unwholesome mine, Drags out in labour a protracted death, To glut their grandeur; may faint with toil, That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.
Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose? Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap Toil and unvanquishable penury
On those who build their palaces, and bring [vice, Their daily bread ?-From vice, black loathsome From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong; From all that genders misery, and makes Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust, Revenge, and murder....And when reason's voice, Loud as the voice of nature, shall have waked The nations, and mankind perceive that vice Is discord, war and misery; that virtue Is peace, and happiness, and harmony; When man's maturer nature shall disdain The playthings of its childhood; kingly glare Will lose its power to dazzle; its authority Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall, Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood's trade Shall be as hateful and unprofitable
Which the vain-glorious mighty of the earth
From time's light footfall, the minutest wave That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothing The unsubstantial bubble. Ay! to-day Stern is the tyrant's mandates, red the gaze That flashes desolation, strong the arm That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes That mardate is a thunder-peal that died In ages past; that gaze, a transient flash On which the midnight closed, and on that arm The worm, has made his meal.
Who, great in his humility as kings Are little in their grandeur; he who leads Invincibly a life of resolute good,
And stands amid the silent dungeon-depths More free and fearless than the trembling judge, Who, clothed in venal power, vainly strove To 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 rolled But to appal the guilty. Yes! the grave
Hath quenched that eye, and death's relentless frost Withered that arm; but the unfading fame Which virtue hangs upon its votary's tomb; The deathless memory of that man whom kings Call to their mind and tremble; the remembrance, With which the happy spirit contemplates Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth,
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man ; The subject, not the citizen: for kings And subjects, mutual foes, for ever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Make slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.
High over flaming Rome, with savage joy Lowered like a fiend, drank with enraptured ear The shrieks of agonizing death, beheld The frightful desolation spread, and felt A new created sense within his soul
Thrill to the sight, and vibrate to the sound, Thinkest thou his grandeur had not overcome The force of hunian kindness? and when Rome, With one stern blow, hurled not the tyrant down, Crushed not the arm, red with her dearest blood, Had not submissive abjectness destroyed Nature's suggestions?
The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees, Arise in due succession: all things speak
Peace, harmony, and love. The universe,
In nature's silent eloquence, declares That all fulfil the works of love and joy,- All but the outcast man. He fabricates
The sword which stabs his peace; he cherisheth The snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth up The tyrant, whose delight is in his woe, Whose sport is in his agony. Yon sun, Lights it the great alone? Yon silver beams, Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch Than on the dome of kings? Is mother earth A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil; A mother only to those puling babes Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men The playthings of their babyhood, and mar In self-important childishness, that peace Which men alone appreciate?
The pure diffusion of thy essence throbs Alike in every human heart.
Thou, aye, erectest there
Thy throne of power unappealable: Thou art the judge beneath whose nod Man's brief and frail authority Is powerless as the wind That passeth idly by.
Thine the tribunal which surpasseth The show of human justice,
As God surpasses man. Spirit of Nature! thou
Life of interminable multitudes;
Soul of those mighty spheres
Whose changeless paths thro' Heaven's deep silence
Soul of that smallest being,
The dwelling of whose life Is one faint April sun-gleam;- Man, like these passive things, Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth: Like theirs, his age of endless peace, Will swiftly, surely come;
And the unbounded frame, which thou pervadest
Will be without a flaw
Marring its perfect symmetry.
How beautiful this night! The balmiest sigh, Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear, Were discord to the speaking quietude That wraps this moveless scene. Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Thro' which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love had spread To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills, Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;
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