Spirit! the Fairy said,

And pointed to the gorgeous dome,
This is a wondrous sight

And mocks all human grandeur;
But, were it virtue's only meed to dwell
In a celestial palace, all resigned
To pleasurable impulses, immured
Within the prison of itself, the will

Of changeless nature would be unfulfilled.
Learn to make others happy. Spirit come!
This is thine high reward:-the past shall rise;
Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach
The secrets of the future.

The Fairy and the Spirit
Approached the overhanging battlement.-
Below lay stretched the universe!
There, far as the remotest line,
That bounds imagination's flight,
Countless and unending orbs
In mazy motion intermingled,
Yet still fulfilled immutably
Eternal Nature's law.
Above, below, around
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony:
Each with undeviating aim,

In eloquent silence through the depths of space
Pursued its wondrous way.

There was a little light

That twinkled in the misty distance:

None but a spirit's eye

Might ken that rolling orb;

None but a spirit's eye,

And in no other place

But that celestial dwelling, might behold
Each action of this earth's inhabitants.
But matter, space, and time

In those ærial mansions cease to act;
And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps
The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds

Those obstacles, of which an earthly soul
Fears to attempt the conquest..

The Fairy pointed to the earth.
The Spirit's intellectual eye
Its kindred beings recognized.
The thronging thousands to a passing view,
Seemed like an anthill's citizens.
How wonderful! that even
The passions, prejudices, interests,
That swayed the meanest being, the weak touch
That moves the finest nerve,

And in one human brain
Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link
In the great chain of nature.

Behold, the Fairy cried,
Palmyra's ruined palaces!-

Behold! where grandeur frowned;
Behold! where pleasure smiled;
What now remains-the memory
Of senselessness and shame
What is immortal there?
Nothing-it stands to tell
A melancholy tale, to give
An awful warning; soon
Oblivion will steal 'silently
The remnant of its fame.
Monarchs and conquerors there
Proud o'er prostrate millions trod-
The earthquakes of the human race;
Like them, forgotten when the ruin
That marks their shock is past.

Beside the eternal Nile,

The Pyramids have risen.
Nile shall pursue his changeless way;
Those pyramids shall fall;

Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell
The spot whereon they stood;
Their very site shall be forgotton,
As is their builder's name!

Behold you steril spot;

Where now the wandering Arab's tent
Flaps in the desert blast.

There once old Salem's haughty fane

Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes, And in the blushing face of day

Exposed its shameful glory.

Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed
The building of that fane; and many a father,
Worn out with toil and slavery, implored
The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth,
And spare his children the detested task
Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning
The choicest days of life,

To soothe a dotard's vanity,

There an inhuman and uncultured race
Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God;
They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb
The unborn child,-old age and infancy
Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms
Left not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends:
But what was he that taught them that the God
Of nature and benevolence had given

A special sanction to the trade of blood?
His name and theirs are fading, and the tales
Of this barbarian nation, which imposture
Recites till terror credits, are pursuing
Itself into forgetfulness.

Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,
There is a moral desert now:

The mean and miserable huts,

The yet more wretched palaces,

Contrasted with those ancient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion;

The long and lonely colonnades,

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks

Seem like a well-known tune,

Which, in some dear scene we have loved to hear,

Remembered now in sadness.

But, oh! how much more changed,

How gloomier is the contrast

Of human nature there!

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,
A coward and a fool, spreads death around-
Then, shuddering meets his own.
Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,
A cowled and hypocritical monk
Prays, curses, and deceives.

Spirit! ten thousand years
Have scarcely past away,

1

Since, in the waste where now the savage drinks His enemy's blood, and aping Europe's sons, Wakes the unholy song of war,

Arose a stately city,

Metropolis of the western continent:
There, now, the mossy column-stone,
Indented by Time's unrelenting grasp,
Which once appeared to brave
All, save its country's ruin;
There the wide forest scéne,
Rude in the uncultivated loveliness
Of gardens long run wild,

Seems, to the unwilling sojourner, whose steps
Chance in that desert has delayed,

Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.
Yet once it was the busiest haunt,
Whither as to a common centre, flocked
Strangers, and ships, and merchandise:
Once peace and freedom blest
The cultivated plain :

But wealth, that curse of man,

Blighted the bud of its prosperity:
Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,
Fled, to return not, until man shall know
That they alone can give the bliss
Worthy a soul that claims

Its kindred with eternity.

There's not one atom of yon earth

But once was living man;

Nor the minutest drop of rain,

That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
But flowed in human veins:
And from the burning plains
Where Lybian monsters yell,
From the most gloomy glens
Of Greenland's sunless clime,
To where the golden fields
Of fertile England spread
Their harvest to the day,
Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.

How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things,
To whom the fragile blade of grass,
That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon,

Is an unbounded world;

I tell thee that those viewless beings,
Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel, and live like man;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the Laws
Ruling their moral state;
And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses
The slightest, faintest motion,
Is fixed and indispensable
As the majestic laws

That rule yon rolling orbs.

The Fairy paused. The Spirit

In cxstacy of admiration, felt

All knowledge of the past revived; the events
Of old and wondrous times,
Which dim tradition interruptedly

Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded
In just perspective to the view;
Yet dim from their infinitude.

The Spirit seemed to stand