For recreation, leading into each :1

These may he range, if willing to partake
Their soft indulgences, and in due time

May issue thence, recruited for the tasks.

And course of service Truth requires from those
Who tend her altars, wait upon her throne,

And guard her fortresses.

Who thinks, and feels,

And recognises ever and anon

The breeze of nature stirring in his soul,
Why need such man go desperately astray,
And nurse the dreadful appetite of death?'
If tired with systems, each in its degree
Substantial, and all crumbling in their turn,
Let him build systems of his own, and smile
At the fond work, demolished with a touch;
If unreligious, let him be at once,
Among ten thousand innocents, enrolled
A pupil in the many-chambered school,
Where superstition weaves her airy dreams.

Life's autumn past, I stand on winter's verge;
And daily lose what I desire to keep:
Yet rather would I instantly decline
To the traditionary sympathies
Of a most rustic ignorance, and take
A fearful apprehension from the owl

Or death-watch: and as readily rejoice,
If two auspicious magpies crossed my way;-
To this would rather bend than see and hear2
The repetitions wearisome of sense,

Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place;

Where knowledge, ill begun in cold remark

On outward things, with formal inference ends;
Or, if the mind turn inward, she recoils

At once-or, not recoiling, is perplexed—
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research ;1
Meanwhile, the heart within the heart, the seat
Where peace and happy consciousness should dwell,
On its own axis restlessly revolving,

Seeks, yet can nowhere find, the light of truth.2*

Upon the breast of new-created earth

Man walked; and when and wheresoe'er he moved,
Alone or mated, solitude was not.

He heard, borne on the wind,3 the articulate voice
Of God;† and Angels to his sight appeared
Crowning the glorious hills of paradise;

Or through the groves gliding like morning mist
Enkindled by the sun. He sate-and talked
With winged Messengers; who daily brought

To his small island in the ethereal deep

Tidings of joy and love. From those pure heights* (Whether of actual vision, sensible

Compare the Poet's Epitaph (Vol. II. p. 66).—ED.

+ Compare Genesis iii. 8.-ED.

Genesis xviii. 1, 2.—ED.

To sight and feeling, or that in this sort
Have condescendingly been shadowed forth
Communications spiritually maintained,
And intuitions moral and divine)

Fell Human-kind--to banishment condemned*
That flowing years repealed not: and distress
And grief spread wide;† but Man escaped the doom
Of destitution;-solitude was not.

-Jehovah-shapeless Power above all Powers,
Single and one, the omnipresent God,
By vocal utterance, or blaze of light,
Or cloud of darkness, localised in heaven;§
On earth, enshrined within the wandering ark ;||
Or, out of Sion, thundering from his throne
Between the Cherubim on the chosen Race
Showered miracles, ** and ceased not to dispense
Judgments, that filled the land from age to age
With hope, and love, and gratitude, and fear;††
And with amazement smote;-thereby to assert
His scorned, or unacknowledged, sovereignty.
And when the One, ineffable of name,
Of nature1 indivisible, withdrew

From mortal adoration or regard,

Not then was Deity engulfed; nor Man,
The rational creature, left, to feel the weight
Of his own reason, without sense or thought

1 1827.

In nature

* Genesis iii. 24. -ED.

+ Genesis iii. 16, 17.—ED.
Exodus vi. 3.-ED.

§ Exodus xxxiii. 9; xxxiv. 5.-ED.
Exodus xxxvii. 1; Hebrews ix. 4.-ED.
Exodus xxv. 22.-Ed.

** Exodus xv. 25; xvi. 4, &c., &c.—ED.
+ Exodus vii.-xi.-ED.

1814.

Of higher reason and a purer will,

To benefit and bless, through mightier power:-
Whether the Persian-zealous to reject

Altar and image, and the inclusive walls,

And roofs of temples built by human hands-✶
To1 loftiest heights ascending, from their tops,
With myrtle-wreathed tiara on his brow,2
Presented sacrifice to moon and stars,

And to the winds and mother elements,

And the whole circle of the heavens, for him

A sensitive existence, and a God,t

With lifted hands invoked, and songs of praise :
Or, less reluctantly to bonds of sense
Yielding his soul, the Babylonian framed
For influence undefined a personal shape;

And, from the plain, with toil immense, upreared
Tower eight times planted on the top of tower,
That Belus, nightly to his splendid couch
Descending, there might rest;‡ upon that height3

* The ancient Persian religion was nature worship. -ED. + Compare Tintern Abbey—

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Vol. I. p. 269.-ED.

A square

Herodotus thus describes the temple of Belus :-" enclosure two furlongs each way, with gates of solid brass; which were also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half way up, one finds a resting place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time in their way to the summit. On the

Pure and serene, diffused-to overlook
Winding Euphrates, and the city vast
Of his devoted worshippers, far-stretched,
With grove and field and garden interspersed ;
Their town, and foodful region for support
Against the pressure of beleaguering war.

Chaldean Shepherds, ranging trackless fields,
Beneath the concave of unclouded skies
Spread like a sea, in boundless solitude,
Looked on the polar star, as on a guide.
And guardian of their course, that never closed.
His stedfast eye. The planetary Five*
With a submissive reverence they beheld;
Watched, from the centre of their sleeping flocks,
Those radiant Mercuries,† that seemed to move
Carrying through ether, in perpetual round,
Decrees and resolutions of the Gods;

topmost tower there is a spacious Temple, and inside the Temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place. . . . The Chaldeans, the priests of this God, declare-but I, for my part, do not credit it-that the God comes down nightly into this chamber and sleeps upon the couch."Herodotus, I. 181. See Rawlinson's version, Vol. I. p. 319-20. Compare also Josephus, Ant. Jud., X. 11, and Strabo, 16.-ED.

Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury-the only planets known to the ancients, the Earth not being included.-Ed.

+ The reference here is still apparently to the "planetary Five," which are all described as "radiant Mercuries" (although one of them was Mercury), because they all

Seemed to move

Carrying through ether, in perpetual round,

Decrees and resolutions of the Gods;

And, by their aspects, signifying works

Of dim futurity,

This astrological allusion makes it clear that the reference is to the supposed "planetary influence," and to the movements of these bodiescontrolled by the gods-with which the fate of mortals was believed to be upbound. For an account of the Gods of the Five Planets, see Chaldean Magic by François Lenormant, pp. 26 and 118.-ED.