All Nature struggling in the pangs of death! Dost thou not hear her? dost thou not deplore Her strong convulsions, and her final groan ? Where are we now? Ah me! the ground is gone On which we stood, Lorenzo! while thou mayst, Provide more firm support, or sink for ever! Where? how? from whence? Vain hope! it is too late! Where, where, for shelter, shall the guilty fly, 215 When consternation turns the good man pale!
Great day! for which all other days were made; For which earth rose from Chaos, man from earth, And an eternity, the date of gods,
Descended on poor earth-created man! Great day of dread, decision, and despair! At thought of thee each sublunary wish Lets go its eager grasp, and drops the world, And catches at each reed of hope in Heaven. At thought of thee !-and art thou absent then? Lorenzo! no; 'tis here ;-it is begun
Already is begun the grand assize,
In thee, in all: deputed Conscience scales The dread tribunal, and forestals our doom; Forestals, and, by forestalling, proves it sure. Why on himself should man void judgment pass? Is idle Nature laughing at her sons?
Who Conscience sent, her sentence will support, And God above assert that God in man. e. v. 222. Thrice happy they! that enter now the court, 235 Heaven opens in their bosoms: but how rare, Ah me! that magnanimity, how rare ! What hero, like the man who stands himself; Who dares to meet his naked heart alone; Who hears intrepid the full charge it brings, Resolved to silence future murmurs there! The coward flies, and, flying, is undone. (Art thou a coward? no :) the coward flies; Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know Asks What is truth with Filate, and retires; 248
Dissolves the court, and mingles with the throng: Asylum sad! from Reason, Hope, and Heaven.
Shall all but man look out with ardent eye For that great day which was ordain'd for man ? O day of consumination! mark supreme (If men are wise) of human thought! nor least Or in the sight of angels, or their King!
Angels, whose radiant circles, height o'er height, Order o'er order rising, blazé o'er blaze, As in a theatre, surround this scene,
Intent on man, and anxious for his fate.
Angels look out for thee; for thee, their Lord, To vindicate his glory; and for thee
Creation universal calls aloud
To disinvolve the moral world, and give
To Nature's renovation brighter charins.
Shall man alone, whose fate, whose final fate, Hangs on that hour, exclude it from his thought?
I think of nothing else; I see! I feel it!
All Nature, like an carthquake, trembling round! 265 All deities, like summer's swarms, on wing All basking in the full meridian blaze!
I see the judge enthroned! the flaming guard! The volume open'd! open'd every heart! A sunbean, pointing out each secret thought'' No patron intercessor one now pass'd The sweet, the clement, mediatorial hour ! For guilt no plea to pain no pause! no bound! Inexorable all and all extreme!
Nor man alone; the foe of God and man, From his dark den, blaspheming, drags his chain, And rears his brazen front, with thunder scarr'd, Receives his sentence, and bogins his hell. Pya All vengeance past, now, seems abundant grace. A Like meteors in a stormy sky, how roll:
His baleful eyes! he curses whom he dreade,
And deems it the first moment of his fall.
Tis present to my thought!-and yet where is it?
'Angels can't tell me; angels cannot guess The period, from created beings lock'd
In darkness; but the process and the place Are less obscure; for these may man inquire. Say, thou great close of human hopes and fears! Great key of hearts! great finisher of fates!
Great end! and great beginning! say, where art thou? Art thou in time, or in eternity?
Nor in eternity nor time I find thee:
These, as two monarchs, on their borders meet, (Monarchs of all elapsed or unarrived!) As in debate, how best their powers allied May swell the grandeur, or discharge the wrath Of him, whom both their monarchies obey. Time, this vast fabric for him built (and door'd With him to fall) now bursting o'er his head, His lamp, the Sun, extinguish'd, from beneath The frown of hideous darkness calls his sons From their long slumber, from earth's heaving womb, To second birth contemporary throng!
Roused at one call, upstarted from one bed,
Fress'd in one crowd, appall'd with one amaze,
He turns them o'er, Eternity! to thee:
Then (as a king deposed disdains to live) He falls on his own scythe, nor falls alone;
His greatest foe falls with him; Time, and he Who murder'd all Time's offspring, Death, expire. 310 Time was! Eternity now reigns alone!
Awful Eternity! offended queen!
And her resentment to mankind how just! With kind intent, soliciting access,
How often has she knock'd at human hearts!
Rich to repay their hospitality,
How often call'd! and with the voice of God!
Yet bore repulse, excluded as a cheat!
A dream while foulest foes found welcome there! A dream, a cheat, now all things but her smile.
For, lo her twice ten thousand gates thrown wide,
As thrice from Indus to the frozen pole,
With banners streaming as the comet's blaze, And clarions louder than the deep in storms,
Sonorous as immortal breath can blow,
Pour forth their myriads, potentates, and powers, Of light, of darkness, in a middle field,
Wide as creation! populous as wide!
A neutral region! there to mark the' event
Of that great drama, whose preceding scenes
Detain'd them close spectators, through a length Of ages, ripening to this grand result; Ages as yet uinumber'd but by God,
Who now, pronouncing sentence, vindicates The rights of virtue, and his own renown. Ete nity, the various sentence pass'd, Assigns the sever'd throng distinct abodes, Sulphureous or ambrosial. What ensues? The deed predominant! the deed of deeds! Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven. 340 The goddess, with determined aspect, turns, Her adamantine key's enormous size
Through Destiny's inextricable wards,
Deep driving every bolt on both their fates; Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,
Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, Ten thousand thousand fathom, there to rust, And ne'er unlock her resolution more.
The deep resounds, and hell, through all her glooms, Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.
O how unlike the chorus of the skies! O how unlike those shouts of joy, that shake The whole ethereal! how the concave rings! Nor strange! when deities their voice exalt; And louder far than when Creation rose, To see Creation's godlike aim and end, So well accomplish'd! so divinely closed! To see the mighty Dramatist's last act As meet) in glory rising o'er the rest.
"No fancied God; a God, indeed, descends, To solve all knots; to strike the moral home; To throw full day on darkest scenes of time; To clear, commend, exalt, and crown the whole. Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise, The charm'd spectators thunder their applause, And the vast void beyond applause resounds. What then am I?-
Amidst applauding worlds,
And worlás celestial, is there found on earth
A peevish, dissonant, rebellious string,
Which jars in the grand chorus, and complains? 370 Censure on thee, Lorenzo! I suspend,
And turn it on myself; how greatly due! All, all is right, by God ordain'd or done; And who, but God, resumed the friends He gave ? And have I been complaining, then, so long? Complaining of his favours, pain and death? Who, without Pain's advice, would e'er be good? Who, without Death, but would be good in vain ? Pain is to save from pain; all punishment
To make for peace; and death to save from death;
And second death to guard immortal life;
To rouse the careless, the presumptuous awe, And turn the tide of souls another way;
By the same tenderness divine ordain'd
That planted Eden, and high-bloom'd for man
A fairer Eden, endless, in the skies.
Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene:
Resumes them, to prepare us for the next. All evils natural are moral goods; All discipline indulgence, on the whole. None are unhappy; all have cause to smile, But such as to themselves that cause deny. Our faults are at the bottom of our pains : Error in act, or judgment, is the scurce Of endless sighs. We sin, or we mistake; And Nature tax, when false opinion stings.
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