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How wonderful that even

The passions, prejudices, interests,

That sway 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 forgotten,
As is their builder's name.

"Behold yon sterile 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 who 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.

66

"Spirit! ten thousand years
Have scarcely passed away

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,

Métropolis of the western continent.
There now the mossy column-stone,
Indented by Time's unrelaxing grasp,
Which once appeared to brave
All save its country's ruin;
There the wide forest scene,

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 merchandize :

Once peace and freedom blessed
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 Libyan 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 ecstacy of admiration, felt
All knowledge of the past revived.
Of old and wondrous times,

Which dim tradition interruptedly

The events

Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded
In just perspective to the view,

Yet,dim from their infinitude.

4

The Spirit seemed to stand
High on an isolated pinnacle;
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around
Nature's unchanging harmony.

3. "FAIRY!" the Spirit said,
And on the Queen of Spells
Fixed her etherial eyes,

"I thank thee. Thou hast given

A boon which I will not resign, and taught
A lesson not to be unlearned. I know
The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly :

For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.

Fairy. Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!
Much yet remains unscanned.
Thou know'st how great is man,

Thou know'st his imbecility :—

Yet learn thou what he is;

Yet learn the lofty destiny
Which restless Time prepares
For every living soul.

Behold a gorgeous palace that amid
Yon populous city rears its thousand towers,
And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops
Of sentinels, in stern and silent ranks,
Encompass it around. The dweller there
Cannot be free and happy; hear'st thou not
The curses of the fatherless, the groans
Of those who have no friend? He passes on.
The King, the wearer of a gilded chain

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites-that man

Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles

At the deep curses which the destitute

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan

But for those morsels which his wantonness

Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save

All that they love from famine. When he hears
The tale of horror, to some ready-made face
Of hypocritical assent he turns,

Smothering the glow of shame that, spite of him,
Flushes his bloated cheek.

Now to the meal

Of silence, grandeur, and excess, he drags
His palled unwilling appetite. If gold
Gleaming around, and numerous viands culled
From every clime, could force the loathing sense
To overcome satiety,-if wealth

The spring it draws from poisons not,- -or vice,
Unfeeling stubborn vice, converteth not
Its food to deadliest venom; then that king
Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils
His unforced task, when he returns at even,
And by the blazing faggot meets again
Her welcome for whom all his toil is sped,
Tastes not a sweeter meal.

Behold him now

Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brain Reels dizzily awhile: but ah! too soon

The slumber of intemperance subsides,

And conscience, that undying serpent, calls
Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task.

Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye-
Oh! mark that deadly visage.

King.

Oh! must this last for ever?

No cessation!

Awful Death,

I wish yet fear to clasp thee! Not one moment
Of dreamless sleep! O dear and blessed Peace!
Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity
In penury and dungeons? Wherefore lurkest
With danger, death, and solitude, yet shunn'st
The palace I have built thee? Sacred Peace!
Oh visit me but once, and pitying shed
One drop of balm upon my withered soul !

Fairy. Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart,
And Peace defileth not her snowy robes

In such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters ;—
His slumbers are but varied agonies;

They prey like scorpions on the springs of life.
There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err: earth in itself
Contains at once the evil and the cure;
And all-sufficing Nature can chastise
Those who transgress her law,
How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits.

she only knows

Is it strange

That this poor wretch should pride him in his woe,
Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug

The scorpion that consumes him? Is it strange
That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns,
Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured

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