That, chang'd through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth as in the etherial frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives through all life, extends through all extent;
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part;
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;

As full as perfect in frail man that mourns,
As the wrapt seraph that adores and burns.
To him, no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.
Cease then; nor order imperfection name;
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,

Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:

And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear whatever is, is right.

MAN.

Young

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who center'd in his make such strange extremes ;
From different natures marvellously mixt;
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity.
A beam etherial, sullied and absorpt!
Though sullied and dishonour'd, still divine.
Dim miniature of greatness absolute !
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a god! I tremble at myself,

And in myself, am lost! at home a stranger;
Thought wanders up and down, surpris'd, aghast,
And wondering at her own: how reason reels.
Oh what a miracle is man to man!

Triumphantly distrest; what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarm'd!

What can preserve my life, or what destroy?
An angel's hand can't snatch me from the grave,
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

૨ ૩

DIGNITY OF MAN.

Akenside.

SAY, why was man so eminently rais'd
Amid the vast creation; why ordain'd,

Through life and death, to dart his piercing eye
With thoughts beyond the limits of his frame,
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run

The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;

To chase each partial purpose from his breast;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering; while the voice
Of truth and virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,
The applauding smile of heaven? The high-born
soul

Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tir'd of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft;
Through fields of air, pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve

The fated rounds of time. Thence, far effus'd,

She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting, measures the perennial wheel
Of nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as, with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now, amaz'd, she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travell❜d the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things.
E'en on the barriers of the world, untir'd,
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till, half recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges; soon o'erwhelm'd and swallow'd up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the Sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of renown,

Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment; but from these,
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.

PROCRASTINATION.

PROCRASTINATION is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And, to the mercies of a moment, leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm; that all men are about to live;
For ever on the brink of being born.
All promise is poor dilatory man,

Young.

And that through every stage; when young, indeed, In full content we sometimes nobly rest

. Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish,

As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.
At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan.
At fifty, chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought

Resolves, and resolves; then dies the same.
And why? Because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming stroke of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden
dread.

But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where pass'd the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wing no scar the sky retains,
The parted wave no furrow from the keel;
So dies in human hearts the thought of death.