DISBELIEF OF A FUTURE STATE.
ARE there (still more amazing) who resist
The rising thought? who smother in its birth
The glorious truth? who struggle to be brutes?
Who through this bosom-barrier burst their way,
And with reversed ambition strive to sink?
Who labour downwards through the opposing powers
Of instinct, reason, and the world against them,
To dismal hopes, and shelter in the shock
Of endless night? night darker than the graves?
Who fight the proofs of immortality?
To contradict them see all nature rise!
What object, what event, the moon beneath,
But argues, or endears an after scene?
To reason proves, or weds it to desire?
All things proclaim it needful, some advance
One precious step beyond, and prove it sure.
A thousand arguments swarm round my pen,
From heaven, and earth, and man. Indulge a few,
By nature as her common habit worn.
Thou! whose all-providential eye surveys,
Whose hand directs, whose spirit fills and warms
Creation, and holds empire far beyond!
Eternity's inhabitant august!
Of two eternities amazing Lord!
One past ere man's, or angel's, had begun ;
Aid, while I rescue from the foes' assault,
Thy glorious immortality in man!
MAN'S IMMORTALITY PROVED BY REFERENCE
TO NATURE.
NATURE, thy daughter, ever changing birth,
Of Thee, the great immutable, to man
Speaks wisdom; is his oracle supreme;
And he who most consults her is most wise.
Look nature through, 'tis revolution all;
All change, no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise, and set, and rise;
Earth takes th' example. See the summer gay,
With her green chaplet, and ambrosial flowers,
Droops into pallid autumn; winter grey,
Horrid with frost, and turbulent with storm,
Blows autumn and his golden fruits away,
Then melts into the spring; soft spring, with breath
Favonian from warm chambers of the south,
Recalls the first. All to reflourish fades;
As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend:
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.
With this minute description, emblem just,
Nature revolves, but man advances! both
Eternal; that a circle, this a line;
That gravitates, this soars. Th' aspiring soul,
Ardent and tremulous, like flame ascends:
Zeal and humility, her wings to heaven.
The world of matter, with its various forms,
All dies into new life. Life born from death,
Rolls the vast mass, and shall for ever roll:
No single atom, once in being, lost,
With change of counsel charges the most High.
Matter immortal? And shall spirit die?
Above the noblest shall less noble rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man! be sown in barren ground,
Less privileged than grain on which he feeds?
Is man, in whom alone is power to prize
The bliss of being, or with previous pain
Deplore its period, by the spleen of fate
Severely doomed death's single unredeemed?
COULDST thou persuade me the next life would fail
Our ardent wishes, how should I pour out
My bleeding heart in anguish, new, as deep!
Oh! with what thoughts, thy hope and my despair,
Abhorred annihilation blasts the soul,
And wide extends the bounds of human woe!
In this black channel would my ravings run:
Grief from the future borrowed peace ere while
The future vanished, and the present pained:
Fall how profound! Hurled headlong, hurled at once
To night! to nothing! darker still than night.
If 'twas a dream, why wake me, my worst foe?
Oh! for delusion! Oh! for error still!
Could vengeance strike much stronger than to plant
A thinking being in a world like this,
Not over rich before, now beggared quite,
More cursed than at the fall? The sun goes out! The thorns shoot up! what thorns in every thought!
Why sense of better? it embitters worse:
Why sense? why life? if but to sigh, then sink
To what I was? twice nothing! and much woe!
Woe from heaven's bounties! woe from what was wont To flatter most, high intellectual powers.
Thought, virtue, knowledge! blessings by thy scheme
All poisoned into pains. First, knowledge, once
My soul's ambition, now her greatest dread.
To know myself true wisdom?-no, to shun
That shocking science, parent of despair!
Avert thy mirror; if I see, I die.
Know my Creator? climb his blest abode,
By painful speculation pierce the vail,
Dive in his nature, read his attributes,
And gaze in admiration-on a foe
Obtruding life, withholding happiness?
From the full rivers that surround his throne.
Nor letting fall one drop of joy on man;
Man gasping for one drop, that he might cease
To curse his birth, nor envy reptiles more!
Ye sable clouds! ye darkest shades of night,
Hide Him, for ever hide Him, from my thought,
Once all my comfort; source and soul of joy!
Know his achievements! study his renown!
Contemplate this amazing universe,
Dropt from his hand with miracles replete!-
For what? 'mid miracles of nobler name
To find one miracle of misery!
To find the being which alone can know
And praise his works, a blemish on his praise?
Through Nature's ample range in thought to stray,
And start at man, the single mourner there,
Breathing high hope chained down to pangs and death.
Knowing is suffering, and shall virtue share
The sigh of knowledge? Virtue shares the sigh
By straining up the steep of excellent;
By battles fought, and from temptation won,
What gains she but the pang of seeing worth,
Angelic worth, soon shuffled in the dark
With every vice, and swept to brutal dust?
Duty! religion! these, our duty done,
Imply reward. Religion is mistake:
Duty? there's none but to repel the cheat.
Ye cheats! away; ye daughters of my pride!
Who feign yourselves the favorites of the skies;
Ye towering hopes! abortive energies!
That toss and struggle in my lying breast
To scale the skies, and build presumption there,
As I were heir of an eternity;
Vain, vain ambitions! trouble me no more.
Why travel far in quest of sure defeat?
As bounded as my being be my wish.
All is inverted, wisdom is a fool:
Sense! take the rein; blind passion! drive us on;
And, ignorance! befriend us on our way;
Yes; give the pulse full empire; live the brute,
Since as the brute we die: the sum of man,
Of godlike man! to revel and to rot.
But not on equal terms with other brutes:
Their revels a more poignant relish yield,
And safer too; they never poisons choose.
Instinct than reason makes more wholesome meals,
And sends all marring murmur far away.
For sensual life they best philosophize;
Theirs that serene the sages sought in vain :
'Tis man alone expostulates with heaven,
His all the power and all the cause to mourn.
Shall human eyes alone dissolve in tears?
And bleed in anguish none but human hearts?
The wide-stretched realm of intellectual woe,
Surpassing sensual far, is all our own.
In life so fatally distinguished why?
Cast in one lot, confounded, lumped in death?
And why then have we thought? to toil and eat, Then make our bed in darkness, needs no thought. What superfluities are reasoning souls!
Oh, give eternity! or thought destroy,
But without thought our curse were half unfelt! Its blunted edge would spare the throbbing heart; And therefore 'tis bestowed. I thank thee, reason,
For aiding life's too small calamities,
And giving being to the dread of death.
Such are thy bounties!-Was it then too much
For me to trespass on the brutal rights?
Too much for heaven to make one eunuch more?
Too much for Chaos to permit my mass
A longer stay with essences unwrought,
Unfashioned, untormented, into man?
Wretched preferment to this round of pains!
Wretched capacity of phrenzy, thought!
Wretched capacity of dying, life!
Life, thought, worth, wisdom, all (oh! foul revolt!)
Once friends to peace, gone over to the foe!
Death then has changed his nature too; O Death,
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