And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nympth, sweet Liberty ;
And, if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free.
Hence, vain deluding joys,
The brood of Folly, without father bred! How little you bestead,
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys! Dwell in some idle brain,
And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess
As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that people the sunbeams, Or likest hovering dreams,
The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train,
But hail, thou goddess, sage and holy !
Hail, divinest Melancholy!
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight,
And therefore to our weaker view,
O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.
Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of cypress lawn,
Over thy decent shoulders drawn,
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes;
There held in holy passion still,
Forget thyself to marble, till
With a sad, leaden, downward cast,
Thou fix them on the earth as fast.
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts;
His acts being seven Ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then the soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side ;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shanks; and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. SHAKSPERE.
But lo! the dome !-the vast and wondrous dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell
Christ's mighty shrine, above his martyr's tomb! I have beheld the Ephesian miracle— Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell Th' hyæna and the jackal in their shade; I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have survey'd Its sanctuary, the while th' usurping Moslem pray'd.
But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone, with nothing like to thee:
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true,
Since Sion's desolation, when that He
Forsook his former city, what could be
Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,
Pow'r, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.
Enter its grandeur o'erwhelms thee not;
And why? It is not lessen'd; but thy mind
Expanded by the genius of the spot,
Has grown colossal, and can only find
A fit abode, wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined,
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
Thou movest, but increasing with the advance, Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows but grows to harmonise— All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles-richer painting-shrines where flame
The lamps of gold-and haughty dome, which vies In air, with earth's chief structures, tho' their frame Sits on the firm-set ground, and this the clouds must claim.
Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break
To separate contemplation, the great whole;
And, as the ocean many bays will make,
That ask the eye-so here condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control
Thy thoughts, until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart,
Not by its fault-but thine: our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp and, as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great,
Defies, at first, our nature's littleness;
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
Then pause and be enlightened; there is more
In such a survey than the sating gaze
Of wonder pleased, or awe, which would adore
The worship of the place or the mere praise
Of art, and its great masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could
plan;
The fountain of sublimity displays
Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can. BYRON.
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