But wandering oft, with brute unconscious gaze, NATURE, attend! Join every living soul, Beneath the spacious temple of the sky, In adoration join, and ardent raise 30 35 One general song! To HIM, ye vocal gales, 40 Breathe soft, whose SPIRIT in your freshness breathes. O, talk of HIM in solitary glooms, Where, o'er the rock, the scarcely waving pine Fills the brown shade with a religious awe! And ye, whose bolder note is heard afar, 45 Who shake the' astonish'd world, lift high to heaven The' impetuous song, and say from whom you rage. His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills; Ye headlong torrents, rapid and profound; Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze 50 Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself, Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice 55 Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers, Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, From world to world, the vital ocean round! Ye valleys, raise for the GREAT SHEPHERD reigns, And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come. 75 Ye woodlands all, awake: a boundless song Burst from the groves; and when the restless day, Sweetest of birds, sweet Philomela, charm The listening shades, and teach the night His praise ! 80 Ye chief, for whom the whole creation smiles, At once the head, the heart, and tongue of all, The long-resounding voice, oft breaking clear, Or if you rather choose the rural shade, There let the shepherd's flute, the virgin's lay, Still sing the GOD OF SEASONS, as they roll. SHOULD Fate command me to the farthest verge 95 100 105 In the void waste as in the city full; And where HE vital spreads, there must be joy. 110 *This verse, and the seven which precede it, formed no part of the HYMN in the octavo edition of 1738, or in those of an earlier date. They first appeared in the greatly enlarged edition of 1744, were repeated in that of 1746, two years prior to the author's decease, and have been retained in those subsequently edited by his friend Murdoch. In all these impressions the 113th line terminates with the word sons, as it is here printed; but in some others of less authority, the last word in the line is suns. To the editors of those copies in which this change is made, Thomson's meaning may appear to have been that of suns, around which the attendant orbs of their systems were supposed severally to revolve. If this were the signification intended by the clause, we might expect to have had it more lucidly expressed by the From seeming evil still educing good, Come then, expressive Silence, muse His praise. 115 poet who, when describing in elegiac strains the discoveries of the immortal Newton, has conveyed, to men of ordinary intellectual power, clear and definite ideas on a subject confessedly difficult of enunciation in the language of poetry. But as sons is the accredited reading of both the editions which had the benefit of the author's last corrections and personal supervision, his meaning may be easily collected from the tenor of the former part of the paragraph, and may claim some affinity with that of Shakspeare's phrase in the Tempest :" "the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit." The chief difference in the epithets employed by the two poets seems to be, that the one denominates the inhabitants and garniture of our globe "all which it inherit;" and the other calls the intelligences in more distant worlds" the sons of all yon orbs."-EDIT. END OF THE SEASONS. |