By mortal hand; it merits a divine;
Angels should paint it, angels ever there,
There on a post of honour and of joy.

Dare I presume, then? but Philander bids,
And glory tempts, and inclination calls.
Yet am I struck, as struck the soul beneath
Aerial groves impenetrable gloom,
Or in some mighty ruin's solemn shade,
Or gazing, by pale lamps, on high-born dust
In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings,
Or at the midnight altar's hallowed flame.
It is religion to proceed: I pause-
And enter, awed, the temple of my theme.
Is it his death-bed? No; it is his shrine:
Behold him there just rising to a god.

With unreluctant grandeur gives, not yields
His soul sublime, and closes with his fate.

How our hearts burnt within us at the scene,
Whence this brave bound o'er limits fix'd to man?
His God sustains him in his final hour!

His final hour brings glory to his God!
Man's glory Heaven vouchsafes to call her own,
We gaze, we weep; mixed tears of grief and joy.
Amazement strikes: devotion bursts to flame:
Christians adore! and infidels believe.

As some tall tower, or lofty mountain's brow,
Detains the sun, illustrious, from its height,
While rising vapours, and descending shades,
With damps and darkness, drown the spacious
vale;

The chamber where the good man meets his fate Undampt by doubt, undarken'd by despair,

Is privileged beyond the common walk

Of virtuous life, quite in the verge of Heaven.
Fly, ye profane! if not, draw near with awe,
Receive the blessing, and adore the chance
That threw in this Bethesda your disease:
If unrestored by this, despair your cure;
For here resistless Demonstration dwells.
A death-bed's a detector of the heart!
Here tired Dissimulation drops her mask
Through Life's grimace, that mistress of the scene!
Here real and apparent are the same,

You see the man, you see his hold on Heaven,
If sound his virtue, as Philander's sound.
Heaven waits not the last moment; owns her friends
On this side death, and points them out to men;
A lecture silent, but of sovereign power!
To Vice confusion, and to Virtue peace.
Whatever farce the boastful hero plays,
Virtue alone has majesty in death;
And greater still, the more the tyrant frowns.
Philander! he severely frowned on thee.
No warning given! unceremonious fate!
A sudden rush from life's meridian joys!
A wrench from all we love! from all we are!
A restless bed of pain! a plunge opaque
Beyond conjecture! feeble Nature's dread!
Strong Reason's shudder, at the dark unknown!
A sun extinguish'd! a just-opening grave!
And, oh! the last, last; what? (can words express,
Thought reach it?) the last-silence of a friend!'
Where are those horrors, that amazement, where
This hideous group of ills, which singly shock,
Demand from man.-I thought him man, till now.
Through Nature's wreck, through vanquish'd
agonies,

(Like the stars struggling through this midnight
gloom)

What gleams of joy? what more than human peace?
Where the frail mortal, the poor abject worm?
No, not in death the mortal to be found.
His conduct is a legacy for all,
Richer than Mammon's for his single heir.
His comforters he comforts; great in ruin

Philander thus augustly rears his head,

At that black hour which general horror sheds
On the low level of the inglorious throng:
Sweet peace, and heavenly hope, and humble joy,
Divinely beam on his exalted soul;
Destruction gild, and crown him for the skies,
With incommunicable lustre bright.

NIGHT III.

NARCISSA.

To Her Grace the Duchess of Portland.

Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.- -Virg.

---

FROM dreams, where thought in Fancy's maze
runs mad,

To reason, that heaven-lighted lamp in man,
Once more I wake; and at the destined hour,
Punctual as lovers to the moment sworn,

I keep my assignation with my wo.
O! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought,
Lost to the noble sallies of the soul;
Who think it solitude to be alone.
Communion sweet! communion large and high!
Our reason, guardian-angel, and our God!
Then nearest these, when others most remote;
And all, ere long, shall be remote but these;
How dreadful, then, to meet them all alone,
A stranger! unacknowledged, unapprov'd!
Now woo them, wed them, bind them to thy breast:
To win thy wish creation has no more:
Or if we wish a fourth, it is a friend.-
But friends how mortal! dangerous the desire.

Take Phoebus to yourselves, ye basking bards!
Inebriate at fair fortune's fountain head,
And reeling through the wilderness of joy,
Where Sense runs savage, broke from Reason's
chain,

And sings false peace, till smother'd by the pall,
My fortune is unlike, unlike my song,
Unlike the deity my song invokes.

Like blossomed trees o'erturn'd by vernal storm,
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay;
And if in death still lovely, lovelier there;
Far lovelier; pity swells the tide of love.

(For dreams are thine) transfuse it through the And will not the severe excuse a sign?

And anguish after rapture, how severe!

He deigned to wear, who hung the vast expanse Rapture bold man! who tempts the wrath divine, With azure bright, and clothed the sun in goll.

By plucking fruit denied to mortal taste,
While here presuming on the rights of Heaven.
For transport dost thou call on every hour,
Lorenzo at thy friend's expense be wise:
Lean not on earth; 'twill pierce thee to the heart;
A broken reed at best; but oft a spear;
On its sharp point Peace bleeds, and Hope ex- When he contended for the patriarch's bones,
pires.
Turn, hopeless thought! turn from her.-The strife of pontiff pride, not pontiff gall.
Thought repelled,

When every passion sleeps that can offend;
When strikes us every motive that can melt;
When man can wreak his rancour uncontrolled,
That strongest curb on insult and ill-will;
Then! spleen to dust? the dust of innocence?
An angel's dust!-This Lucifer transcends;

Resenting rallies, and wakes every wo.
Snatched ere thy prime! and in thy bridal hour!
And when kind Fortune, with thy lover, smiled!
And when high-flavoured thy fresh-opening joys'
And when blind man pronounced thy bliss com-
plete!

And on a foreign shore where strangers wept!
Strangers to thee, and, more surprising still,
Strangers to kindness, wept. Their eyes let fall
Inhuman tears; strange tears! that trickled down
From marble hearts! obdurate tenderness!
A tenderness that called them more severe,
In spite of Nature's soft persuasion steeled:
While Nature melted, Superstition raved;
That mourned the dead, and this denied a grave.
Their sighs incensed; sighs foreign to the will!
Their will the tiger-sucked outraged the storm:
For, oh! the cursed ungodliness of Zeal!
While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursed
In blind Infallibility's embrace,
The sainted spirit petrified the breast:
Denied the charity of dust to spread
O'er dust! a charity their dogs enjoy.
What could I do? what succour? what resource?
With pious sacrilege a grave I stole ;
With impious piety that grave I wronged;
Short in my duty, coward in my grief!
More like her murderer than friend, I crept
With soft-suspended step, and, muffled deep
In midnight darkness, whispered my last sigh.
I whispered what should echo through their realms,
Nor writ her name, whose tomb should pierce the

skies.

Presumptuous fear! how durst I dread her foes,
While Naure's loudest dictates I obeyed?
Pardon necessity, blest shade! of grief
And indignation rival bursts I poured;
Half-execration mingled with my prayer;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored:
Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamped the curst soil; and with humanity
(Denied Narcissa) wished them all a grave.
Glows my resentment into guilt? what guilt
Can equal violations of the dead?

The dead how sacred! sacred is the dust
Of this heaven-laboured form, erect, divine!
This heaven assumed, majestic, robe of earth

'Twas not the strife of malice, but of pride;

Far less than this is shocking in a face
Most wretched, but from streams of mutual love,
And uncreated, but for love divine;
And but for love divine this moment lost,
By Fate resorbed, and sunk in endless night.
Man hard of heart to man! of horrid things
Most horrid! mid stupendous highly strange!
Yet oft his courtesies are smoother wrongs;
Pride brandishes the favours he confers,
And contumelious his humanity:
What then his vengeance? Hear it not, ye Stars!
And thou, pale Moon! turn paler at the sound,
Man is to man the sorest, surest ill.
A previous blast foretells the rising storm;
O'erwhelming turrets threaten, ere they fall;
Volcanos bellow, ere they disembogue;
Earth trembles, ere her yawning jaws devour;
And smoke betrays the wide-consuming fire:
Ruin from man is most concealed when near,
And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.
Is this the flight of Fancy? would it were!
Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings, but Himself,
That hideous sight, a naked human heart.

Fired is the Muse? and let the Muse be fired:
Who not inflamed, when what he speaks he feels,
And in the nerve most tender, in his friends;
Shame to mankind! Philander had his foes;
He felt the truths I sing, and I in him:
But he nor I feel more. Past ills, Narcissa!
Are sunk in thee, thou recent wound of heart,
Which bleeds with other cares, with other pangs:
Pangs numerous as the numerous ills that swarmed
O'er thy distinguished fate, and clustering there,
Thick as the locust on the land of Nile,
Made death more deadly, and more dark the grave.
Reflect (if not forgot my touching tale)
How was cach circumstance with aspics armed?
An aspic each, and all an hydra-wo.
What strong Herculean virtue could suffice?--
Or is it virtue to be conquered here?
This hoary cheek a train of tears bedews,
And each tear mourns its own distinct distress,
And each distress, distinctly mourn'd, demands
Of grief still more, as heightened by the whole.
A grief like this proprietors excludes:
Not friends alone such obsequies deplore;
They make mankind the mourner; carry signs
Far as he fatal Fame can wing her wav,

And turn the gayest thought of gayest age And why not think on death? Is life the theme Down their right channel, through the vale of Of every thought? and wish of every hour?

death.

The vale of death? that hush'd Cimmerian vale,
Where Darkness, brooding o'er unfinished fates,
With raven wing incumbent, waits the day
(Dread day!) that interdicts all future change;
That subterranean world, that land of ruin!
Fit walk, Lorenzo! for proud human thought!
There let my thoughts expatiate, and explore
Balsamic truths and healing sentiments,
Of all most wanted, and most welcome, here.
For gay Lorenzo's sake, and for thy own,
My soul! The fruits of dying friends survey;
Expose the vain of life; weigh life and death;
Give Death his eulogy; thy fear subdued;
And labour that first palm of noble minds,
A manly scorn of terror from the tomb.'

This harvest reap from thy Narcissa's grave.
As poets feigned from Ajax' streaming blood
Arose, with grief inscribed, a mournful flower,
Let wisdom blossom from my mortal wound.
And first, of dying friends; what fruit from these?
It brings us more than triple aid; an aid

And song of every joy? surprising truth!
The beaten spaniel's fondness not so strange.
To wave the numerous ills that seize on life
As their own property, their lawful prey;
Ere man has measured half his weary stage,
His luxuries have left him no reserve,
No maiden relishes, unbroached delights:
On cold-served repetitions he subsists,
And in the tasteless present chews the past;
Disgusted chews, and scarce can swallow down.
Like lavish ancestors, his earlier years
Have disinherited his future hours,

Which starve on orts, and glean their former
field.

Live ever here, Lorenzo !-shocking thought!
So shocking! they who wish disown it too;
Disown from shame, what they from folly crave.
Live ever in the womb, nor see the light?
For what, live ever here?—with labouring step
To tread our former footsteps? pace the round
Eternal? to climb life's worn heavy wheel,
Which draws up nothing new? to beat, and beat,

To chase our thoughtlessness, fear, pride, and The beaten track? to bid each wretched day guilt.

Our dying friends come o'er us like a cloud,
To damp our brainless ardours, and abate
That glare of light, which often blinds the wise.
Our dying friends are pioneers, to smooth
Our rugged pass to death; to break those bars
Of terror and abhorrence Nature throws
Cross our obstructed way, and thus to make
Welcome, as safe, our port from every storm.
Each friend by Fate snatched from us is a plume
Plucked from the wing of human vanity,
Which makes us stoop from our aërial heights,
And damped with omen of our own decease,
On drooping pinions of ambition lowered,
Just skim earth's surface ere we break it up,
O'er putrid earth to scratch a little dust,

The former mock? to surfeit on the same,
And yawn our joys? or thank a misery
For change though sad! to see what we have
seen?

Hear, till unheard, the same old slabbered tale?
To taste the tasted, and at each return
Less tasteful? o'er our palates to decant
Another vintage? strain a flatter year
Through loaded vessels, and a laxer tone?
Crazy machines to grind earth's wasted fruits!
Ill ground, and worse concocted! load, not life!
The rational foul kennels of excess!
Still-streaming thoroughfares of dull debauch!
Trembling each gulp, lest Death should snatch
the bowl.

Such of our fine ones is the wish refined!

And save the world a nuisance. Smitten friends So would they have it: elegant desire!
Are angels sent on errands full of love;
For us they languish, and for us they die:
And shall they languish, shall they die, in vain?
Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hovering shades,
Which wait the revolution in our hearts?
Shall we disdain their silent, soft, address,
Their posthumous advice, and pious prayer?
Senseless as herds that graze their hallowed graves,
Tread under foot their agonies and groans,
Frustrate their anguish, and destroy their deaths?
Lorenzo! no; the thought of death indulge;
Give it its wholesome empire! let it reign,
That kind chastiser of thy soul, in joy!
Its reign will spread thy glorious conquests far,
And still the tumults of thy ruffled breast.
Auspicious era! goluen days, begin!
The thought of death shall, like a god, inspire.

Why not invite the bellowing stalls and wilds?
But such examples might their riot awe.
Through want of virtue, that is, want of thought,
(Though on bright thought they father all their
flights)

To what are they reduced? to love and hate
The same vain world; to censure and espouse
This painted shrew of life, who calls them fool
Each moment of each day; to flatter bad,
Through dread of worse; to cling to this rude
rock,

Barren to them of good, and sharp with ills,
And hourly blackened with impending storms,
And infamous for wrecks of human hope--
Scared at the gloomy gulf that yawns beneath.
Such are their triumphs! such their pangs of joy!
'Tis time, high time, to shift this dismal scene.

dis-Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay;