With gentle force foliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and healed, and bade me live.
Since then, with few affociates, in remote
And filent woods I wander, far from thofe
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few affociates, and not wishing more.
Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once, and others of a life to come.
1 fee that all are wanderers, gone aftray
Each in his own delufions; they are loft
In chafe of fancied happiness, ftill wooed
And never won. Dream after dream enfues;
And ftill they dream that they shall still fuccced,
And ftill are difappointed. Rings the world
With the vain ftir. I fum up half mankind,
And add two thirds of the remaining half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears
Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay
As if created only like the fly,
That spreads his motley wings in the eye of
To fport their feason, and be seen no more.
The reft are fober dreamers, grave and wife,
And pregnant with difcoveries new and rare.
Some write a narrative of wars, and feats
Of heroes little known; and call the rant
An hiftory: defcribe the man, of whom
His own coevals took but little note,
And paint his person, character, and views,
As they had known him, from his mother's womb.
They difentangle from the puzzled skein,
In which obfcurity has wrapped them up,
The threads of politic and fhrewd defign,
That ran through all his purposes, and charge
His mind with meanings that he never had,
Or having kept concealed. Some drill and bore
The folid earth, and from the ftrata there
Extra a register, by which we learn,
That he who made it, and revealed its date
To Mofes, was mistaken in its age.
Some, more acute, and more induftrious ftill,
Contrive creation; travel nature up
To the sharp peak of her sublimeft height,
And tell us whence the ftars; why fome are fixed,
And planetary fome; what gave them firft
Rotation, from what fountain flowed their light.
Great conteft follows, and much learned duft
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both. And thus they spend
The little wick of life's poor fhallow lamp
In playing tricks with nature, giving laws
To diftant worlds, and trifling in their own.
Is't not a pity now, that tickling rheums
Should ever tease the lungs, and blear the fight
Of oracles like these? Great pity too,
That having wielded the elements, and built
A thousand fyftems, each in his own way,
They should go out in fume, and be forgot?
Ah! what is life thus fpent? and what are they
But frantic, who thus spend it? all for smoke-
Eternity for bubbles proves at last
A fenfeless bargain. When I fee fuch games
Played by the creatures of a power, who swears
That he will judge the earth, and call the fool
To a sharp reckoning, that has lived in vain;
And when I weigh this feeming wisdom well,
And prove it in the infallible refult
So hollow and fo falfe-I feel my heart
Diffolve in pity, and account the learned,
If this be learning, moft of all deceived.
Great crimes alarm the confcience, but it fleeps,
While thoughtful man is plaufibly amused.
Defend me therefore common fense, say I,
From reveries fo airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up!
"Twere well, fays one fage erudite, profound,
Terribly arched, and aquiline his nose,
And overbuilt with most impending brows,
'Twere well, could you permit the world to live
As the world pleases. What's the world to you?
Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk
As fweet as charity from human breasts.
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,
And exercise all functions of a man.
How then fhould I and any man that lives
Be ftrangers to each other? Pierce my vein,
Take of the crimson ftream meandering there,
And catechife it well; apply thy glass,
Search it, and prove now if it be not blood
Congenial with thine own: and, if it be,
What edge of fubtlety canft thou fuppofe
Keen enough, wife and skilful as thou art,
To cut the link of brotherhood, by which
One common Maker bound me to the kind?
True; I am no proficient, I confess,
In arts like your's. I cannot call the swift
And perilous lightnings from the angry clouds,
And bid them hide themselves in earth beneath;
I cannot analyse the air, nor catch
The parallax of yonder luminous point,
That feems half quenched in the immense abyfs: Such powers I boaft not-neither can I reft
A filent witness of the headlong rage,
Or heedlefs folly, by which thousands die,
Bone of my bone, and kindred fouls to mine.
God never meant that man should scale the heavens By ftrides of human witdom. In his works, Though wondrous, he commands us in his word To feek him rather, where his mercy shines. The mind indeed, enlightened from above, Views him in all; afcribes to the grand caufe The grand effect; acknowledges with joy His manner, and with rapture tastes his style. But never yet did philofophic tube, That brings the planets home into the eye Of obfervation, and discovers, else
Not vifible, his family of worlds,
Discover him, that rules them; such a veil
Hangs over mortal eyes, blind from the birth,
And dark in things divine. Full often too
Our wayward intellect, the more we learn
Of nature, overlooks her author more;
From inftrumental caufes proud to draw
Conclufions retrograde, and mad mistake.
Eut if his word once teach us, fhoot a ray
Through all the heart's dark chambers, and reveal
Truths undifcerned but by that holy light,
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