The Saviour comes! While, as the thousand Lead With conscious zeal had urged Love's wondrous plan, Coadjutors of God. To Milton's trump Raises to Heaven: and he of mortal kind O Years! the blest preeminence of saints! Ye sweep athwart my gaze, so heavenly bright, The wings that veil the adoring Seraphs' eyes, What time they bend before the Jasper Thronet * David Hartley. + Rev. chap. iv. verses 2 and 3.—And immediately I was in the Spirit: and behold, a throne was set in Heaven and one sat on the Throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone, &c. Reflect no lovelier hues! Yet ye depart, Whence Fancy falls, fluttering her idle wing. When, seized in his mid course, the Sun shall wane Making noon ghastly! Who of woman born May image in the workings of his thought, How the black-visaged, red-eyed Fiend outstretched * Beneath the unsteady feet of Nature groans, Believe thou, O my soul, Life is a vision shadowy of Truth; And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave, Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire, And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God, Forth flashing unimaginable day, Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell. * The final destruction impersonated. Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er And ye of plastic power, that interfused And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing THE DESTINY OF NATIONS. A VISION. AUSPICIOUS Reverence! Hush all meaner song, To the Will Absolute, the One, the Good! Such symphony requires best instrument. Seize, then, my soul! from Freedom's trophied dome The harp which hangeth high between the shields Of Brutus and Leonidas! With that Strong music, that soliciting spell, force back Man's free and stirring spirit that lies entranced. For what is freedom, but the unfettered use Of all the powers which God for use had given? But chiefly this, him first, him last to view Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken Thou with retracted beams, and self-eclipse But some there are who deem themselves most free When they within this gross and visible sphere With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, But properties are God: the naked mass (If mass there be, fantastic guess or ghost,) Acts only by its inactivity. Here we pause humbly. Others boldlier think That as one body seems the aggregate |