ASPIRATIONS AFTER THE INFINITE.
Let faith suppress each rising fear,
Each anxious doubt exclude;
Thy Maker's will has placed thee here,
A Maker wise and good.
He to thy ev'ry trial knows,
Its just restraint to give ;
Attentive to behold thy woes,
And faithful to relieve.
Then why thus heavy, O my
Say, why distrustful still,
Thy thoughts with vain impatience roll
O'er scenes of future ill?
Though griefs unnumber'd throng thee round,
Still in thy God confide,
Whose finger marks the seas their bound,
And curbs the headlong tide.
MARK AKENSIDE.
BORN, 1721; DIED, 1770.
ASPIRATIONS AFTER THE INFINITE.
SAY, why was man so eminently raised
Amid the vast creation; why ordain'd
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;
To chase each partial purpose from his breast;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of truth and virtue, up the steep ascent
Of nature, calls him to his high reward;
The applauding smile of heaven? Else wherefore burns
In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope,
That breathes from day to day sublimer things,
And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace
Majestic forms; impatient to be free,
Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns
To heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade,
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tir'd of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve
The fated rounds of time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel
Of nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended lights, as with a milky zone,
DEPENDENCE ON PROVIDENCE.
Invest the orient. Now, amaz'd she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things.
Even on the barriers of the world untir'd
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till half recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges; soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the sovʼreign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of renown,
Power's purple robes, nor pleasure's flow'ry lap;
The soul should find enjoyment: but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,
Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.
NATHANIEL COTTON.
BORN, 1721; DIED, 1788.
DEPENDENCE ON PROVIDENCE.
REGARD the world with cautious eye,
Nor raise your expectations high;
See that the balanc'd scale be such,'
You neither fear nor hope too much,
For disappointment's not the thing;
'Tis pride and passion point the sting
Life is a sea where storms must rise.
'Tis folly talks of cloudless skies;
He who contracts his swelling sail,
Eludes the fury of the gale.
Be still, nor anxious thoughts employ; Distrust embitters present joy;
On God for all events depend:
You cannot want when God's your friend. Weigh well your part, and do your best; Leave to your Maker all the rest.
The hand which form'd thee in the womb, Guides from the cradle to the tomb.
Can the fond mother slight her boy;
Can she forget her prattling joy?
Say, then, shall sov'reign love desert
The humble and the honest heart?
Heav'n may not grant thee all thy mind,
Yet say not thou that heav'n's unkind.
God is alike both good and wise,
In what he grants, and what denies ;
Perhaps, what Goodness gives to-day,
To-morrow Goodness takes away.
You say that troubles intervene ;
That sorrows darken half the scene.
True, and this consequence you see,
The world was ne'er designed for thee.
You're like a passenger below,
That stays, perhaps, a night or so;
But still his native country lies
Beyond the bound'ries of the skies.
Of heav'n ask virtue, wisdom, health;
But never let thy pray'r be wealth.
If food be thine (though little gold),
And raiment to repel the cold;
Such as may nature's wants suffice,
Not what from pride and folly rise;
If soft the motions of thy soul,
And a calm conscience crowns the whole;
Add but a friend to all this store,
You can't, in reason, wish for more;
And if kind heav'n this comfort brings,
"Tis more than heav'n bestows on kings.
CHRISTOPHER SMART.
BORN, 1722; DIED, 1770.
ON RECOVERING FROM A DANGEROUS ILLNESS. WHEN Israel's ruler on the Royal bed
In anguish and in perturbation lay, The down reliev'd not his anointed head,
And rest gave place to horror and dismay . Fast flowed the tears, high heav'd each gasping sigh, When God's own prophet thunder'd-Monarch, thou must die.
But, O immortals, what had I to plead,
When death stood o'er me with his threat'ning lance! When reason left me in the time of need,
And sense was lost in terror or in trance;
My sinking soul was with my blood inflamed,
And the celestial image sunk, defaced and maimed.
The virtuous partner of my nuptial bands
Appeared a widow to my frantic sight;
My little prattlers, lifting up their hands,
Beckon me back to them, to life, to light.
I come, ye spotless sweets! I come again;
Nor have your tears been shed, nor have ye knelt in vain.
THE FINAL JUDGMENT.
HE comes! He comes! the awful trump I hear!
The flaming sword's intolerable blaze
I see; He comes! the archangel from above,
Arise, ye tenants of the silent grave,
Awake, ye incorruptible-arise;
From east to west, from the antarctic pole
To regions hyperborean, all ye sons,
Ye sons of Adam, and ye heirs of heaven,
Arise, ye tenants of the silent grave,
Awake, ye incorruptible-arise.
'Tis then, nor sooner, that the restless mind
Shall find itself at home; and like the ark
Fixed on the mountain's top shall look aloft
O'er the vague passage of precarious life.
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