NATURE UNIMPAIRED BY TIME.
Aн, how the human mind wearies herself With her own wanderings, and, involved in gloom
Impenetrable, speculates amiss!
Measuring in her folly things divine
By human; laws inscribed on adamant
By laws of man's device; and counsels fix'd
Forever, by the hours that pass and die.
How ?-shall the face of nature then be
plough'd
Into deep wrinkles, and shall years at last
On the great parent fix a sterile curse?
Shall even she confess old age, and halt,
And, palsy-smitten, shake her starry brows?
Shall foul antiquity with rust, and drought,
And famine, vex the radiant worlds above?
Shall Time's unsated maw crave and ingulf
The very heavens, that regulate his flight?
And was the sire of all able to fence
His works, and to uphold the circling worlds,
But, through improvident and heedless haste
Let slip the occasion ?-so then-all is lost-
And in some future evil hour, yon arch [poles
Shall crumble, and come thundering down, the
Jar in collision, the Olympian king,
Fall with his throne, and Pallas, holding forth
The terrors of the Gorgon shield in vain,
Shall rush to the abyss, like Vulcan hurl'd
Down into Lemnos, through the gate of heaven.
Thou also, with precipitated wheels,
Phoebus! thy own son's fall shalt imitate,
With hideous ruin shalt impress the deep
Suddenly, and the flood shall reek, and hiss,
At the extinction of the lamp of day.
Then too shall Hæmus, cloven to his base,
Be shatter'd, and the huge Ceraunian hills,
Once weapons of Tartarean Dis, immersed
In Erebus, shall fill himself with fear.
No. The Almighty Father surer laid
His deep foundations, and providing well
For the event of all, the scales of fate
Suspended in just equipoise, and bade
His universal works, from age to age,
One tenor hold, perpetual, undisturb'd.
Hence the prime mover wheels itself about Continual, day by day, and with it bears In social measure swift, the heavens around. Not tardier now is Saturn than of old, Nor radiant less the burning casque of Mars. Phœbus, his vigor unimpair'd, still shows The effulgence of his youth, nor needs the god A downward course, that he may warm the vales; But, ever rich in influence, runs his road, Sign after sign, through all the heavenly zone. Beautiful, as at first, ascends the star From odoriferous Ind, whose office is To gather home betimes the ethereal flock, To pour them o'er the skies again at eve, And to discriminate the night and day. Still Cynthia's changeful horn waxes and wanes Alternate, and with arms extended still
She welcomes to her breast her brother's beams. Nor have the elements deserted yet
Their functions; thunder with as loud a stroke As erst smites through the rocks and scatters them.
The east still howls; still the relentless north
Invades the shuddering Scythian, still he breathes
The winter, and still rolls the storms along.
The king of ocean, with his wonted force,
Beats on Pelorus; o'er the deep is heard
The hoarse alarm of Triton's sounding shell;
Nor swim the monsters of the Ægean sea
In shallows, or beneath diminished waves.
Thou too, thy ancient vegetative power
Enjoy'st, O Earth! Narcissus still is sweet;
And Phoebus! still thy favorite, and still
Thy favorite Cytherea! both retain
Their beauty; nor their mountains, ore-enrich'd
For punishment of man, with purer gold
Teem'd ever, or with brighter gems the deep.
Thus in unbroken series all proceeds;
And shall, till wide involving either pole,
And the immensity of yonder heaven,
The final flames of destiny absorb
The world, consumed in one enormous pyre!
ON THE PLATONIC IDEA AS IT WAS
UNDERSTOOD BY ARISTOTLE.
YE sister powers, who o'er the sacred groves
Preside, and thou, fair mother of them all,
Mnemosyne! and thou who, in thy grot
Immense, reclined at leisure, hast in charge
The archives and the ordinances of Jove,
And dost record the festivals of heaven,
Eternity!-inform us who is He,
That great original, by nature chosen
To be the archetype of human kind,
Unchangeable, immortal, with the poles
Themselves coëval, one, yet everywhere,
An image of the God who gave him being?
Twin-brother of the goddess born from Jove,
He dwells not in his father's mind, but, though
Of common nature with ourselves, exists
Apart, and occupies a local home-
Whether companion of the stars, he spend
Eternal ages, roaming at his will
From sphere to sphere, the tenfold heavens, or On the moon's side that nearest neighbors earth, Or torpid on the banks of Lethe sit
Among the multitude of souls ordain'd
To flesh and blood; or whether (as may chance)
That vast and giant model of our kind
In some far distant region of this globe
Sequester'd stalk with lifted head on high
O'ertowering Atlas, on whose shoulders rest
The stars, terrific even to the gods.
Never the Theban seer, whose blindness proved
His best illumination, him beheld
In secret vision; never him the son
Of Pleione, amid the noiseless night
Descending to the prophet choir reveal'd;
Him never knew the Assyrian priest, who yet
The ancestry of Ninus' chronicles,
And Belus, and Osiris, far renown'd;
Nor even thrice great Hermes, although skill'd
So deep in mystery, to the worshippers
Of Isis show'd a prodigy like him.
And thou, who hast immortalized the shades
Of Academus, if the schools received
This monster of the fancy first from thee,
Either recall at once thy banish'd bards
To thy republic, or thyself, evinced
A wilder fabulist, go also forth.
On that Pieria's spring would through my breast Pour its inspiring influence, and rush
No rill, but rather an o'erflowing flood;
That, for my venerable father's sake
[wings
All meaner themes renounced, my muse, on
Of duty borne, might reach a loftier strain!
For thee, my father! howsoe'er it please,
She frames this slender work; nor know I aught
That may thy gifts more suitably requite:
Though to requite them suitably would ask
Returns much nobler, and surpassing far
The meagre stores of verbal gratitude:
But, such as I possess, I send thee all.
This page presents thee in their full amount
With thy son's treasures, and the sum is nought;
Nought, save the riches that from airy dream
In secret grottoes and in laurel bowers,
I have, by golden Clio's gift, acquired.
Verse is a work divine; despise not thou
Verse therefore, which evinces (nothing more)
Man's heavenly source, and which, retaining still
Some scintillations of Promethean fire,
Bespeaks him animated from above.
The gods love verse; the infernal powers them
Confess the influence of verse, which stirs
The lowest deep, and binds in triple chains
Of adamant both Pluto and the shades.
In verse the Delphic priestess and the pale
Tremulous sybil make the future known;
And he who sacrifices, on the shrine
Hangs verse, both when he smites the threatening
And when he spreads his reeking entrails wide
To scrutinize the fates enveloped there.
We too, ourselves, what time we seek again
Our native skies, and one eternal now
Shall be the only measure of our being,
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