ALL touch, all eye, all ear,
The Spirit felt the Fairy's burning speech.
O'er the thin texture of its frame
The varying periods painted changing glows;
As on a summer even,
When soul-enfolding music floats around,
The stainless mirror of the lake
Re-images the eastern gloom,
Mingling convulsively its purple hues
With sunset's burnished gold.
Then thus the Spirit spoke :
"It is a wild and miserable world,
Thorny, and full of care,
Which every fiend can make his prey at will.
O Fairy! in the lapse of years
Is there no hope in store?
Will yon vast suns roll on
Interminably, still illuming
The night of so many wretched souls,
And see no hope for them?
Will not the Universal Spirit e'er
Revivify this withered limb of heaven ?"
The Fairy calmly smiled
In comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope
Suffused the Spirit's lineaments.
"Oh rest thee tranquil! chase those fearful doubts, Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul
That sees the chains which bind it to its doom.
Yes! crime and misery are in yonder earth,
Falsehood, mistake, and lust;
But the eternal world
Contains at once the evil and the cure.
Some eminent in virtue shall start up,
Even in perversest time :
The truths of their pure lips, that never die,
Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreath
Of ever-living flame,
Until the monster sting itself to death.
"How sweet a scene will earth become-
Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place,
Symphonious with the planetary spheres-
When Man, with changeless Nature coalescing,
Will undertake regeneration's work!
When its ungenial poles no longer point
To the red and baleful sun
That faintly twinkles there!*
Spirit, on yonder earth
Falsehood now triumphs; deadly Power
Has fixed its seal upon the lip of Truth.
Madness and misery are there :
The happiest is most wretched. Yet confide-
Until pure
health-drops from the cup of joy
Fall like a dew of balm upon the world.
Now to the scene I show in silence turn,
And read the blood-stained charter of all woe,
Which Nature soon, with re-creating hand,
Will blot in mercy from the book of earth.
How bold the flight of Passion's wandering wing,
How swift the step of Reason's firmer tread,
How calm and sweet the victories of life,
How terrorless the triumph of the grave,—
How powerless were the mightiest monarch's arm,
Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown,—
How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar,
The weight of his exterminating curse
How light, and his affected charity,
To suit the pressure of the changing times,
What palpable deceit—but for thy aid,
Religion but for thee, prolific fiend,
Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men,
And heaven with slaves!
"Thou taintest all thou look'st upon !-The stars Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet Were gods to the distempered playfulness
Of thy untutored infancy: the trees,
The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea,
All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly,
Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moon
Her worshiper. Then thou becam❜st, a boy,
More daring in thy frenzies: every shape,
Monstrous or vast or beautifully wild,
Which from sensation's relics fancy culls;
The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost,
The genii of the elements, the powers
That give a shape to Nature's varied works,
Had life and place in the corrupt belief
Of thy blind heart: yet still thy youthful hands
Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave
Its strength and ardour to thy frenzied brain.
Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene,
Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride :
Their everlasting and unchanging laws
Reproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stood'st
Baffled and gloomy. Then thou didst sum-up
The elements of all that thou didst know,—
The changing seasons, winter's leafless reign,
The budding of the heaven-breathing trees,
The eternal orbs that beautify the night,
The sunrise, and the setting of the moon,
Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease;
And, all their causes to an abstract point
Converging, thou didst bend, and call it God !!
The self-sufficing, the omnipotent,
The merciful, and the avenging God,—
Who, prototype of human misrule, sits
High in heaven's realm, upon a golden throne,
Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work,
Hell, gapes for ever for the unhappy slaves
Of fate, whom he created in his sport,
To triumph in their torments when they fell.
Earth heard the name; Earth trembled, as the smoke
Of his revenge ascended up to heaven,
Blotting the constellations; and the cries
Of millions butchered in sweet confidence
And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds
Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths
Sworn in his dreadful name, rung through the land;
Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear,
And thou didst laugh to hear the mother's shriek
Of maniac gladness as the sacred steel
Felt cold in her torn entrails!
"Religion! thou wert then in manhood's prime.
But age crept on: one God would not suffice
For senile puerility. Thou framedst
A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut
Thy misery-thirsting soul; that the mad fiend
Thy wickedness had pictured might afford
A plea for sating the unnatural thirst
For murder, rapine, violence, and crime,
That still consumed thy being, even when
Thou heardst the step of Fate; that flames might light
Thy funeral-scene, and the shrill horrent shrieks
Of parents dying on the pile that burned
To light their children to thy paths, the roar
Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries
Of thine apostles, loud commingling there,
Might sate thine hungry ear
Even on the bed of death!
"But now contempt is mocking thy grey hairs;
Thou art descending to the darksome grave,
Unhonoured and unpitied but by those
Whose pride is passing-by like thine, and sheds,
Like thine, a glare that fades before the sun
Of truth, and shines but in the dreadful night
That long has loured above the ruined world.
"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused
A Spirit of activity and life,
That knows no term, cessation, or decay;
That fades not when the lamp of earthly life,
Extinguished in the dampness of the grave,
Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe
In the dim newness of its being feels
The impulses of sublunary things,
And all is wonder to unpractised sense ;
But, active, steadfast, and eternal, still
Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars,
Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves,
Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease;
And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly
Rolls round the eternal universe, and shakes
Its undecaying battlement, presides,
Apportioning with irresistible law
The place each spring of its machine shall fill ;—
So that, when waves on waves tumultuous heap
Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven
Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords
(Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner
Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock,
All seems unlinked contingency and chance),
No atom of this turbulence fulfils
A vague and unnecessitated task,
Or acts but as it must and ought to act.
Even the minutest molecule of light
That in an April sunbeam's fleeting glow
Fulfils its destined though invisible work
The universal Spirit guides; nor less,
When merciless ambition or mad zeal
Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field,
That blind they there may dig each other's graves,
And call the sad work glory, does it rule
All passions. Not a thought, a will, an act,
No working of the tyrant's moody mind,
Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast
Their servitude, to hide the shame they feel,
Nor the events enchaining every will,
That from the depths of unrecorded time
Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass
Unrecognized or unforeseen by thee,
Soul of the Universe! eternal spring
Of life and death, of happiness and woe,
Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene
That floats before our eyes in wavering light,
Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,
Whose chains and massy walls
We feel but cannot see!
"Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power! Necessity, thou mother of the world!
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