Books are not seldom talismans and spells By which the magic art of shrewder wits Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.
Some to the fascination of a name Surrender judgment hoodwinked. Some the style Infatuates, and, through labyrinths and wilds Of error, leads them by a tune entranced.
While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear The insupportable fatigue of thought, And swallowing therefore without pause or choice The total grist unsifted, husks and all.
But trees, and rivulets whose rapid course Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer, And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs, And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root, Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth, Not shy as in the world, and to be won By slow solicitation, seize at once The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.
What prodigies can power divine perform More grand than it produces year by year, And all in sight of inattentive man?
Familiar with the effect we slight the cause, And in the constancy of Nature's course, The regular return of genial months, And renovation of a faded world, See nought to wonder at. Should God again, As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race Of the undeviating and punctual sun, How would the world admire! but speaks it less An agency divine, to make him know His moment when to sink and when to rise Age after age, than to arrest his course?
All we behold is miracle: but, seen So duly, all is miracle in vain.
Where now the vital energy that moved, While summer was, the pure and subtle lymph Through the imperceptible meandering veins Of leaf and flower? It sleeps: and the icy touch Of unprolific winter has impressed A cold stagnation on the intestine tide.
But let the months go round, a few short months, And all shall be restored. These naked shoots, Barren as lances, among which the wind Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes, Shall put their graceful foliage on again, And more aspiring and with ampler spread Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.
Then, each in its peculiar honours clad, Shall publish even to the distant eye Its family and tribe. Laburnum rich In streaming gold; syringa ivory pure;The scented and the scentless rose; this red And of a humbler growth, the other tall, And throwing up into the darkest gloom Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew, Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf That the wind severs from the broken wave;The lilac various in array, now white, Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set With purple spikes pyramidal, as if Studious of ornament, yet unresolved Which hue she most approved, she chose them all;Copious of flowers the woodbine, pale and wan, But well compensating their sickly looks With never-cloying odours, early and late;Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm Of flowers like flies, clothing her slender rods, That scarce a leaf appears; mezereon too, Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset With blushing wreaths investing every spray;Althaea with the purple eye; the broom, Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed Her blossoms; and luxuriant above all The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets, The deep dark green of whose unvarnished leaf Makes more conspicuous, and illumines more The bright profusion of her scattered stars.--These have been, and these shall be in their day, And all this uniform uncoloured scene Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load, And flush into variety again.
From dearth to plenty, and from death to life, Is Nature's progress when she lectures man In heavenly truth; evincing, as she makes The grand transition, that there lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
The beauties of the wilderness are His, That make so gay the solitary place Where no eye sees them. And the fairer forms That cultivation glories in, are His.
He sets the bright procession on its way, And marshals all the order of the year.
He marks the bounds which Winter may not pass, And blunts his pointed fury. In its case, Russet and rude, folds up the tender germ Uninjured, with inimitable art, And, ere one flowery season fades and dies, Designs the blooming wonders of the next.
Some say that in the origin of things, When all creation started into birth, The infant elements received a law From which they swerve not since; that under force Of that controlling ordinance they move, And need not His immediate hand, who first Prescribed their course, to regulate it now.
Thus dream they, and contrive to save a God The encumbrance of His own concerns, and spare The great Artificer of all that moves The stress of a continual act, the pain Of unremitted vigilance and care, As too laborious and severe a task.
So man the moth is not afraid, it seems, To span Omnipotence, and measure might That knows no measure, by the scanty rule And standard of his own, that is to-day, And is not ere to-morrow's sun go down.
But how should matter occupy a charge Dull as it is, and satisfy a law So vast in its demands, unless impelled To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force, And under pressure of some conscious cause?
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire By which the mighty process is maintained, Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow-circling ages are as transient days;Whose work is without labour, whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts, And whose beneficence no charge exhausts.
Him blind antiquity profaned, not served, With self-taught rites and under various names Female and male, Pomona, Pales, Pan, And Flora and Vertumnus; peopling earth With tutelary goddesses and gods That were not, and commending as they would To each some province, garden, field, or grove.
