Th' insulting elements their lord control, And on his limbs their baneful influence cast, And his sad heart with horrid conflict rend; "Late I was in thee love, and pow'r, and will; "If, in thy strength, thou didst not hold thy state, To bliss through anguish, and through death to life. "Foil'd by a devilish foe, thy weakness fell, "You, by his fetters, can alone be freed; To wash your stains, the Lamb of Love must bleed; So shall his woe turn all your woe to weal, His bruises medicine, and his woundings heal. "Hence man, apostate man, so deeply lost, Jesus, meanwhile, shall steal, like doubtful morn, "His seed, in flesh, my Holy-One shall sow, "Hence through the course of their sublunar life, Though brother'd, they shall be at truceless strife: What one approves, the other shall reject; What one detests, the other shall affect. So man, at once, shall court what he 'll contemn, Neglect yet rev'rence, do what he 'll condemn; At once transgress, and wish he could fulfil; Be righteous and unrighteous, good and ill; Bearing the witness and the seal, within, Of new and old, the man of grace and sin, The heart-writ story of his rise and fall, The gospel of his freedom and his thrall. "Thy elder offspring, Adam, grown and strong, Shall oft convict his outward mate of sin; "But, through much grief, this glory must be won; Flesh, soil'd by sin, by death must be undone; Must drop the world, wherein it felt its force, And, giant-like, rejoic'd to run its course; Must drop each organ of its late delight; Must bid a long adieu to sense and sight, A long adieu to ev'ry darling lust; Must yield its passive members, dust to dust, Within the potter's furnace to be fin'd, And leave its grossness, with its guilt, behind. "Meanspace, those forms of flesh, those sons of sin, Shall serve to hold my priceless pearls within; As golden grain within prolific clay, To shoot and ripen toward a future day. "Yon maggot, vilest offspring of vile earth, Answers the genial baseness of his birth: Lo, where he rolls and battens, with delight, In filth, to smell offensive, foul to sight! Well pleas'd, he drinks the stench, the dirt devours, And prides him in the puddle of his powers; Careless, unconscious of the beauteous guest, The internal speck committed to his breast. Yet in his breast the internal speck grows warm, And quickens into motion, life, and form; Far other form than that its fosterer bore, High o'er its parent-worm ordain'd to soar: The son, still growing as the sire decays, In radiant plumes his infant shape arrays; Matures, as in a soft and silent womb; Then, opening, peeps from his paternal tomb; Now, struggling, breaks at once into the day, Tries his young limbs, and bids his wings display, Expands his lineaments, erects his face, Rises sublime o'er all the reptile race; From dew-drop'd blossoms sips the nectar'd stream, And basks within the glory of the beam. "Thus, to a sensual, to a sinful shrine, The Saviour shall entrust his speck divine; In secret animate his chosen seed, Fill with his love, and with his substance feed; This (in a word) the Father spoke-and straight The good from evil he did then divide, And set man's darkness from God's light aside: Wide, from the heart, he bids his will be done, And there plac'd conscience as a central Sun; Whence reason, like the Moon, derives, by night, A weak, a borrow'd, and a dubious light. But, down the soul's abyss, a region dire! He caus'd the Stygian horrours to retire; From whence ascends the gloom of many a pest, Dark'ning the beam of Heav'n within the breast; Atrocious intimations, causeless care, 1 Nor less, the pregnant region of the mind Brought forth conceptions suited to its kind; Faint emblems, yet of virtue to proclaim That parent-spirit, whence our spirits came; Spirits that, like their God, with mimic skill, Produce new forms and images at will; Thoughts that from Earth, with wing'd emotion soar, New tracts expatiate, and new worlds explore; Backward, through space and through duration, run, Passing the bounds of all that e'er begun; Then, as a glance of lightning, forward flee, Straining to reach at all that e'er shall be. Thus, in the womb of man's abyss are sown Natures, worlds, wonders, to himself unknown. A comprehension, a mysterious plan Of all the almighty works of God, is man; From Hell's dire depth to Heav'n's supremest height, Including good and evil, dark and light. What shall we call this son of grace and sin, This demon, this divinity within, This flame eternal, this foul mould'ring clodA fiend, or seraph-A poor worm, or God? O, the fell conflict, the intestine strife, This clash of good and evil, death and life! What, what are all the wars of sea and wind, Or wreck of matter, to this war of mind? Two minds in one, and each a truceless guest, Rending the sphere of our distracted breast! Who shall deliver, in a fight so fell; Who save from this intestine dog of Hell? God! thou hast said, that Nature shall decay, And all yon starr'd expansion pass away: That, in thy wrath, pollution shall expire, The Sun himself consume with hotter fire; The melting Earth forsake its form and face, These elements depart, but find no place; Succeeded by a peaceful bless'd serene, New Heav'ns and Earth, wherein the just shall reign. O then, upon the same benignant plan, Sap, crush, consume this mass of ill, in man! Within this transient frame of mould'ring clay, Let death's cerberean demon have his day; Let him tear off this world, the nurse of lust, Grind flesh, and sense, and sin, and self to dustBut O, preserve the principle divine; In mind and matter, save whate'er is thine! O'er time, and pain, and death, to be renew'd; Fill'd with our God, and with our God endu'd! THE LIFE OF JOHN SCOTT, BY MR. CHALMERS. THIS HIS very amiable man, the youngest son of Samuel and Martha Scott, was born on the ninth day of January 1730, in the Grange Walk, in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey. His father was a draper and citizen of London, a man of plain and irreproachable manners, and one of the society of the people called Quakers, in which persuasion our poet was educated, and continued during the whole of his life, although not with the strictest attention to all the peculiarities of that sect'. His father does not appear to have intended him for a classical education. In his seventh year he was put under the tuition of one John Clarke, a native of Scotland, who kept a school in Bermondsey Street, but attended young Scott at his father's house, where he instructed him in the rudiments of the Latin tongue. Little is known of his proficiency under this tutor, whom, however, in his latter days, he remembered with pleasure, although he was a man of severe manners. In his tenth year, his father retired with his family, consisting of Mrs. Scott and two sons, to the village of Amwell in Hertfordshire, where, for some time, he carried on the malting trade. Here our poet was sent to a private day-school, in which he is said to have had few opportunities of polite literature, and those few were declined by his father from a dread of the small-pox, which neither he nor his son had yet caught. This terrour, perpetually recurring as the disorder made its appearance in one quarter or another, occasioned such frequent removals as prevented his son from the advantages of regular education. The youth, however, did not neglect to cultivate his mind by such means as were in his power. About the age of seventeen, he discovered an inclination to the study of poetry, with which he combined a delight in viewing the appearances of rural At this time he derived much assistance from the conversation and opinions of one Charles Frogley, a person in the humble station of a bricklayer, but who had improved a natural taste for poetry, and arrived at a considerable degree of critical dis nature. He used thee and thou in conversation and correspondence, and conformed to the Quaker-garb, but on the title-page of the edition of his poems published by himself the year before his death, he is called John Scott, esq. C. |