Upon the very vitals of the heart. Talk not to me of pleasure and enjoyment: How vain indeed is all the world can give ! What are its urgents and pretended charms Now to my wounded, agonising conscience, Writhing beneath an overwhelming load? Of guilt uncancelled and for vengeance crying, Than Abel's blood a thousand times more loud? Heaven, could I only but the past retrieve, Those halcyon years of innocence and sunshine Which lighted up my steps when life I started, How opposite a course should I pursue, And ever curse through life the cursed bottle! O heaven! O mercy! O eternity!
How terrible the night the last I passed; The horrid thoughts of such a dismal dream My very reason stun, yea, paralyse, And petrify each spring of moral action, So full of awful sights and hideous forms— Of incidents terrific and appalling, Whose spirit-crushing, overpowering weight Memory but vainly struggles to forego. Methought on some stupendous height I stood, So elevated seemed it that the world, With all its varied scenes of endless change, As one vast map beneath me spreading lay— Seas, rivers, islands, continents, and kingdoms, Mountains and valleys, precipices, plains;
Ten thousand swarming cities, towns, and villas, With countless landscapes stretching everywhere,
Which with a glance unerring I beheld
From those strange powers of vision then vouchsafed; Methought a universal Summer smiled,
And Nature's vernal loveliness o'erspread The hill and dale, the forest and the field; While bright in cloudless glory beamed the sun, And poured athwart the liquid waste of ocean, In dazzling profusion, streaming gold:
All seemed with gladness, and with joy inspired. But gradually a melancholy change,
And noiseless as the chariot-wheels of Time The vast stupendous panorama palled;
Heaven's azure vault, in horrible array,
Black sombre clouds of threatening aspect filled; Day's monarch, as if wearied with his travel, Mantled his blood-like countenance in gloom, And seemed retiring to eternal rest. A death-like stillness, awfully portentous Of some commotion dire, and unexampled In earth's chronology, the vast arena With terror striking increase brooded o'er. The very constitution of the air,
That balance of its elements essential To life and comfort, seemed for ever lost; Stagnant and putrid, loathsome and sulphureous, And as a furnace scorching everywhere. Well I remember, and will ne'er forget, The oppressive, suffocating, dread sensation Felt at each breath: and O the pain
Which writhed relentlessly this shattered body,
The terror, and alarm, and black forebodings Each heart possessed and countenance betrayed, As from the fissures of the arid earth,
Rolled in infernal, dread, and dense confusion Throughout the scene, huge globes of burning fire— Of red and blue, of azure, green, and gold— Like bombs exploding with tremendous roar, Thus dealing death and devastation round; Whose dire reflection, mingling with the glare Of scouting meteors, through the lowering heavens, Produced such strange phenomena, that words In vain must ever labour to unfold. To aggravate the universal gloom,
Nature resigned her verdure, and assumed The sickly and the aureate hues of Autumn. And as if lashed by Winter's rudest storm, Denuded stood the trees, branch after branch, Inspiring melancholy, hoary fell
In rotten shivered fragments to the ground. The rivers, too, evaporated seemed;
And where their limpid volumes proudly flowed, Blue tides of molten and infernal fire, In desolating vengeance, hideous rolled, Diverging into streams, thus intersecting In nameless horror the stupendous scene. While o'er the vast of the eternal deep, In sable pomp and awful majesty, Sat Death implacable, in triumph throned; By dire Destruction, Terror, and Dismay, His fell and sullen satellites, environed.
Becalmed and motionless, on the expanse, The ships of every nation scattered lay,
And frittered down by piecemeal, mast by mast, With hoarse, tremendous, and prophetic crash,
A gloomy mass of lumber headlong fell;
While from the shattered shrouds and rotten
How agonizing still to recollection !—
Dropped the poor trembling mariners, and slept
Amid the sad and ruinous confusion,
That long, profound, and dreamless sleep of death. Nor to the ocean seemed at all confined Those dark appalling ravages of Fate; But rampant Desolation, uncontrolled, Like an ambitious, all-despoiling hero, With strides gigantic, soon the mighty whole Per force possessed, and claimed by right of conquest. How the magnificent, stupendous piles,
Of sublunary grandeur, power and pride, Those august temples, palaces, and towers, Renowned in story, and the boast of nations, Asunder rent, and crumbled to the earth; While through the streets-oh! misery unmingled- Of fast dissolving towns and cities ran, In consternation and in terror frantic,
Thousands and thousands of their doomed inhabitants.
O it was terrible, if aught is so,
To see the mournful groups the rest then formed, In pity sad, imploring attitude,
With fear and trembling, on the bended knee.
Some wailing, look to Heaven, beseeching mercy; And some went howling, and in wild despair Their garments rent, and for a refuge sought Amid the dismal havoc, but in vain. With downcast eyes, all weeping, others sat; Others, again, as rueful statues stood, And wrung their hands in wordless agony. While fits of frenzy, and of hellish fury, Sedition, hatred, murder, and revenge Others then seized, and hence impelled to acts From which imagination yet recoils; Armed with the various implements of death, As banded desperadoes, how they rushed, Amid the tumult dread, on all they met; Thus in a common carnage ruthless blending Their fellow-citizens of all conditions,
Alike regardless both of sex and age. While everywhere-oh! horrible indeed- Fed by their countless hecatombs of victims, The gloomy, all-devouring faggots blazed; Great armies too, in battle-like array,
All countries seemed to devastate and plunder, Which ever and anon in mortal conflict With others would exultingly engage. Methought, in short, the world had turned a hell; And under the dominion of the devil, Its denizens of every class and colour Apparently were held; all law, all rule, Restraint, and human sympathy seemed lost. At length a change succeeded, and drew
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