Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and GOD adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees GOD in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or Milky Way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
Go, wiser thou, and in thy scale of sense
Weigh thy opinion against Providence ;
Call imperfection what thou fanciest such;
Say, Here He gives too little, there too much :
Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,
Yet say, if man's unhappy, GOD's unjust;
If man alone engross not Heaven's high care,
Alone made perfect here, immortal there,
Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod,
Re-judge His justice, be the God of GOD.
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies:
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,-
Men would be angels, angels would be Gods.
Aspiring to be Gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels, men rebel;
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against th' eternal cause.
Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, "Tis for mine:
For me kind Nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower;
Annual for me, the grape, the rose, renew
The juice nectareous and the balmy dew;
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."
But errs not Nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep? "No," 't is replied, "the first Almighty Cause
Acts not by partial but by general laws;
Th' exceptions few: some change since all began ;
And what created perfect?"-Why, then, Man?
If the great end be human happiness,
Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?
As much that end a constant course requires
Of showers and sunshine, as of man's desires;
As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,
As men for ever temperate, calm, and wise.
If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design,
Why, then, a Borgia or a Catiline?
Who knows, but He whose hand the lightning forms,
Who heaves old Ocean, and who wings the storms,
Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar's mind,
Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind?
From pride, from pride our very reasoning springs,
Account for moral as for natural things:
Why charge we Heaven in those, in these acquit?
In both, to reason right, is to submit.
Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,
Were there all harmony, all virtue here;
That never air or ocean felt the wind,
That never passion discomposed the mind.
But all subsists by elemental strife;
And passions are the elements of life.
The general order, since the whole began,
Is kept in Nature, and is kept in man.
AR as creation's ample range extends,
The scale of sensual, mental, power ascends: Mark how it mounts to man's imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass :
THE PROPER OBJECTS OF EXPENSE.
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam;
Of smell, the headlong lioness between,
And hound sagacious on the tainted green;
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,
To that which warbles through the vernal wood!
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line :
In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true
From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew!
How instinct varies in the grovelling swine,
Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine!
"Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier!
For ever separate, yet for ever near !
Remembrance and reflection, how allied!
What thin partitions sense from thought divide !
And middle natures, how they long to join,
Yet never pass th' insuperable line!
Without this just gradation, could they be
Subjected, these to those, or all to thee?
The powers of all subdued by thee alone,
Is not thy reason all these powers in one?
The Proper Objects
of Expense.
NOTHER age shall see the golden ear
Embrown the slope and nod on the parterre,
Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned,
And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.
Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil,
Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle?
'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.
You, too, proceed! make falling arts your care,
Erect new wonders, and the old repair;
Bid harbours open, public ways extend,
Bid temples worthier of the GOD ascend,
Bid the broad arch the dangerous flood contain,
The mole projected break the roaring main,
Back to his bounds their subject sea command,
And roll obedient rivers through the land:
These honours peace to happy Britain brings;
These are imperial works, and worthy kings.
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