Caught in whose monstrous twine Behemoth* yells, His bones loud-crashing!
Whom foul oppression's ruffian gluttony Drives from life's plenteous feast! O thou poor Who nursed in darkness and made wild by want, Roamest for prey, yea thy unnatural hand Dost lift to deeds of blood! O pale-eyed form, The victim of seduction, doomed to know Polluted nights and days of blasphemy; Who in loathed orgies with lewd wassailers Must gaily laugh, while thy remembered home Gnaws like a viper at thy secret heart! O aged women! ye who weekly catch The morsel tossed by law-forced charity, And die so slowly, that none call it murder! O loathly suppliants! ye, that unreceived Totter heart-broken from the closing gates Of the full Lazar-house: or, gazing, stand Sick with despair! O ye to glory's field Forced or ensnared, who, as ye gasp in death, Bleed with new wounds beneath the vulture's beak! O thou poor widow, who in dreams dost view Thy husband's mangled corse, and from short doze Start'st with a shriek; or in thy half-thatched cot Waked by the wintry night-storm, wet and cold Cow'rst o'er thy screaming baby! Rest awhile Children of wretchedness! More groans must rise, More blood must stream, or ere your wrongs be full. Yet is the day of retribution nigh:
The Lamb of God hath opened the fifth seal : And upward rush on swiftest wing of fire The innumerable multitude of Wrongs By man on man inflicted! Rest awhile, Children of wretchedness! The hour is nigh; And lo! the great, the rich, the mighty Men,
* Behemoth, in Hebrew, signifies wild beasts in general. Some believe it is the elephant, some the hippopotamus; some affirm it is the wild bull Poetically it designates any large quadruped.
The Kings and the chief Captains of the World, With all that fixed on high like stars of Heaven Shot baleful influence, shall be cast to earth, Vile and down-trodden, as the untimely fruit Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm. Even now the storm begins :* each gentle name, Faith and meek Piety, with fearful joy Tremble far-off-for lo! the giant Frenzy
Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm
Mocketh high Heaven; burst hideous from the cell Where the old Hag, unconquerable, huge,
Creation's eyeless drudge, black ruin, sits
Nursing the impatient earthquake.
Pure Faith! meek Piety! The abhorred Form Whose scarlet robe was stiff with earthly pomp, Who drank iniquity in cups of gold,
Whose names were many and all blasphemous, Hath met the horrible judgment! Whence that cry? The mighty army of foul Spirits shrieked Disherited of earth! For she hath fallen
On whose black front was written Mystery;
She that reeled heavily, whose wine was blood;
She that worked whoredom with the Demon Power, And from the dark embrace all evil things
Brought forth and nurtured: mitred atheism!
And patient Folly who on bended knee
Gives back the steel that stabbed him; and pale Fear Haunted by ghastlier shapings than surround
Moon-blasted Madness when he yells at midnight! Return pure Faith! return meek Piety!
The kingdoms of the world are yours: each heart
Self-governed, the vast family of Love
Raised from the common earth by common toil Enjoy the equal produce. Such delights As float to earth, permitted visitants! When in some hour of solemn jubilee The massy gates of Paradise are thrown * Alluding to the French Revolution.
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
And odors snatched from beds of amaranth, And they, that from the crystal river of life Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales! The favored good man in his lonely walk Perceives them, and his silent spirit drinks Strange bliss which he shall recognize in heaven. And such delights, such strange beatitudes Seize on my young anticipating heart When that blest future rushes on my view!
For in his own and in his Father's might
The Saviour comes! While as the Thousand Years Lead up their mystic dance, the Desert shouts ! Old Ocean claps his hands! The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe'er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love's wondrous plan Coadjutors of God. To Milton's trump
The high groves of the renovated Earth Unbosom their glad echoes; inly hushed, Adoring Newton his serener eye
Raises to heaven and he of mortal kind Wisest, he first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain. Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening the blind multitude Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying he retired, And mused expectant on these promised years. O Years! the blest pre-eminence of Saints!
sweep athwart my gaze, so heavenly bright, The wings that veil the adoring Seraphs' eyes, What time they bend before the Jasper Thronef Reflect no lovelier hues! Yet ye depart,
And all beyond is darkness! Heights most strange,
† Rev. chap. iv. v. 2 and 3 :—And immediately I was in the Spirit: and behold, a Throne was set in Heaven and one sat on the Throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone, &c.
Whence Fancy falls, fluttering her idle wing.
For who of woman born may paint the hour, When seized in his mid course, the Sun shall wane Making noon ghastly! Who of woman born May image in the workings of his thought, How the black-visaged, red-eyed Fiend outstretched* Beneath the unsteady feet of Nature groans, In feverous slumbers-destined then to wake, When fiery whirlwinds thunder his dread name And Angels shout, Destruction! How his arm The last great Spirit lifting high in air
Shall swear by Him, the ever-living One, Time is no more!
Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;
And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave, Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire, And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God Forth flashing unimaginable day
Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell.
Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover der With untired gaze the immeasurable fount Ebullient with creative Deity!
And ye of plastic power, that interfused Roll through the grosser and material mass In organizing surge! Holies of God! (And what if Monads of the infinite mind) I haply journeying my immortal course
Shall sometime join your mystic choir. Till then I discipline my young and novice thought
In ministeries of heart-stirring song,
And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air
Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love, Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul As the great Sun, when he his influence
Sheds on the frost-bound waters-The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.
* The final destruction impersonated.
AUSPICIOUS Reverence! Hush all meaner song, Ere we the deep preluding strain have poured To the great Father, only Rightful King, Eternal Father! King Omnipotent!
To the Will Absolute, the One, the Good! The I AM, the Word, the Life, the Living God!
Such symphony requires best instrument. Seize, then, my soul! from Freedom's trophied dome The harp which hangeth high between the shields Of Brutus and Leonidas! With that
Strong music, that soliciting spell, force back Man's free and stirring spirit that lies entranced.
For what is freedom, but the unfettered use Of all the powers which God for use had given? But chiefly this, him first, him last to view Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright reality,
That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from its shadow.
Whose latence is the plenitude of all,
Thou with retracted beams, and self-eclipse
Veiling, revealest thine eternal Sun.
But some there are who deem themselves most free
When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, Untenanting creation of its God.
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