Reflections suggested by the conclusion of the former book.-Peace among the nations recommended, on the ground of their common fellowship in sorrow. -Prodigies enumerated.-Sicilian earthquakes.Man rendered obnoxious to these calamities by sin.-God the agent in them.-The philosophy that stops at secondary causes reproved. Our own late miscarriages accounted for.—Satirical'notice taken of our trips to Fontainbleau. But the pulpit, not satire, the proper engine of reformation. The Reverend Advertiser of engraved sermons.-Petit-maitre Parson. The good preacher. -Pictures of a theatrical clerical coxcomb.-Story-tellers and jesters in the pulpit reproved.Apostrophe to popular applause.--Retailers of ancient philosophy expostulated with.-Sum of the whole matter.-Effects of sacerdotal mismanagement on the laity.-Their folly and extravagance. -The mischiefs of profusion.-Profusion itself, with all its consequent evils, ascribed, as to its principal cause, to the want of discipline in the universities.
Ои for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pained, My soul is sick, with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage, with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond Of brotherhood is severed as the flax,
That falls asunder at the touch of fire. He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not coloured like his own; and having power To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as a lawful prey. Lands intersected by a narrow frith Abhor each other. Mountains interposed Make enemies of nations, who had else Like kindred drops been mingled into one. Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys; And, worse than all, and most to be deplored As human nature's broadest, foulest blot, Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart Weeps, when she sees inflicted on a beast. Then what is man? And what man, seeing this. And having human feelings, does not blush, And hang his head, to think himself a man? I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth, That sinews bought and sold have ever earned. No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's Just estimation prized above all price,
I had much rather be myself the slave,
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him. We have no slaves at home.-Then why abroad? And they themselves once ferried over the wave, That parts us, are emancipate and loosed. Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That is noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your empire; that where Britain's power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too. Sure there is need of social intercourse, Benevolence, and peace, and mutual aid, Between the nations in a world, that seems To toll the death-bell of its own decease,
And by the voice of all its elements
To preach the general doom*. When were the winds
Let slip with such a warrant to destroy?
* Alluding to the calamities in Jamaica.
When did the waves so haughtily overleap Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry? Fires from beneath, and meteors * from above, Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old And crazy earth has had her shaking fits More frequent, and foregone her usual rest. Is it a time to wrangle, when the props And pillars of our planet seem to fail, And Nature † with a dim and sickly eye To wait the close of all? But grant her end More distant, and that prophecy demands A longer respite, unaccomplished yet; Still they are frowning signals, and bespeak Displeasure in his breast, who smites the earth Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice. And 'tis but seemly, that, where all deserve And stand exposed by common peccancy To what no few have felt, there should be peace, And brethren in calamity should love.
Alas for Sicily! rude fragments now
Lie scattered, where the shapely column stood. Her palaces are dust. In all her streets
Alluding to the fog that covered both Europe and Asia during the whole summer of 1783.
The voice of singing and the sprightly chord Are silent. Revelry, and dance, and show Suffer a syncope and solemn pause ;
While God performs upon the trembling stage Of his own works his dreadful part alone. How does the earth receive him?—With what signs Of gratulation and delight her king?
Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad, Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums, Disclosing paradise wherever he treads?
She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb, Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps And fiery caverns, roars beneath his foot.
The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke, For he has touched them. From the extremest point Of elevation down into the abyss
His wrath is busy, and his frown is felt.
The rocks fall headlong, and the vallies rise,
The rivers die into offensive pools,
And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross And mortal nuisance into all the air.
What solid was, by transformation strange, Grows fluid; and the fixed and rooted earth, Tormented into billows, heaves and swells, Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs
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