University of Virginia Library

Descending to this sublunary orb,
From the third heaven th' empyreal realm of love,
Its native element, (sublimely pure,
And all pervading) how am I thrown,
As from the glowing centre of the sun,
Down to earth's frozen and benighted pole.

Will no kind visitant from heaven, reveal
By what unerring sign apostate man
May know himself preparing to regain
Lost paradise, its innocence and bliss?
Tis nothing less than that same image lost,
Effaced by sin, new stamp'd upon the soul.
What else, but God's own likeness, could prepare
Angel or man, his presence to enjoy?
What, but the temper of the heavenly world
Could fit a being to be happy there?
This temper and that likeness meet in love.
Love is the watch-word at the gate of heav'n.
Religion comes to mortals richly fraught
With this celestial grace, and scatters round
Its heav'n-born fragrance in this distant soil,
As spices, when exposed in foreign climes,
Breathe out the native odours of their own.

Time well employ'd is Satan's deadliest foe:
It leaves no opening for the lurking fiend:
Life it imparts to watchfulness and prayer,
Statues, without it in the form of guards.

The closet which the saint devotes to prayer,
Is not his temple only, but his tower,
Whither he runs for refuge, when attack'd,
His armory, to which he soon retreats
When danger warns, his weapons to select,
And fit them on. He dares not stop to plead
When taken by surprise and half o'ercome,
That now to venture near the hallow'd place
Were but profane; a plea that marks a soul
Glad to impose on conscience with a show
Of humble veneration, to secure
Present indulgence, which, when once enjoy'd,
It means to mourn with floods of bitter tears.

The tempter quits his vain pursuit and flies,
When by the mounting suppliant drawn too near
The upper world of purity and light.
He loses sight of his intended prey,
In that effulgence beaming from the throne
Radiant with mercy. But devotion fails
To succour and preserve the tempted soul,
Whose time and talents rest or run to waste.
Ne'er will the incense of the morn diffuse
A salutary savour through the day,
With charities and duties not well filled.
These form the links of an electric chain
That join the orisons of morn and eve,
And propagate through all its several parts,
While kept continuous, the etherial fire;
But if a break be found the fire is spent.

Too long I've wandered, though by truth led on;
But still the strong enchantment which unmans
The pensive lovers of the calm sublime,
And which, unbroke, upon the lap of ease
Lays them to sleep, wrapt up in selfish gloom
Unmindful of the claims of social life,
Demands regard, ere yet I quite return.

How rich in scenes that nurse in pensive souls
A tenderness voluptuously soft,
Till grown to indolent and morbid gloom,
Fatal to active usefulness, to peace with heaven,
Is nature's varied field. A mind in love
With mournful musing, never turns in vain
To nature for some dear congenial scene;
But scenes there are, so fraught with soothing power,
They woo the pensive mind when unemployed.

A sultry noon, not in the summer's prime
When all is fresh with life, and youth, and bloom,
But near its close when vegetation stops,
And fruits mature, stand ripening in the sun,
Sooths and enervates with its thousand charms,
Its images of silence and of rest,
The melancholy mind. The fields are still;
The husbandman has gone to his repast,
And, that partaken, on the coolest side
Of his abode, reclines, in sweet repose.
Deep in the shaded stream the cattle stand,
The flocks beside the fence, with heads all prone
And panting quick. The fields for harvest ripe,
No breezes bend in smooth and graceful waves,
While with their motion, dim and bright by turns,
The sun-shine seems to move; nor e'en a breath
Brushes along the surface with a shade,
Fleeting and thin, like that of flying smoke.
The slender stalks, their heavy bended heads
Support as motionless, as oaks their tops.
O'er all the woods the top-most leaves are still,
E'en the wild poplar leaves, that, pendant hung
By stems elastic, quiver at a breath,
Rest in the general calm. The thistle down
Seen high and thick, by gazing up beside
Some shading object, in a silver shower
Plumb down, and slower than the slowest snow,
Through all the sleepy atmosphere descends;
And where it lights, though on the steepest roof,
Or smallest spire of grass, remains unmoved.
White as a fleece, as dense and as distinct
From the resplendent sky, a single cloud
On the soft bosom of the air becalmed,
Drops a lone shadow as distinct and still,
On the bare plain, or sunny mountain's side;
Or in the polished mirror of the lake,
In which the deep reflected sky appears
A calm sublime immensity below.

Beneath a sun
That crowns the centre of the azure cope,
A blaze of light intense o'erspreads the whole
Of nature's face; and he that overlooks,
From some proud eminence, the champaign round,
Notes all the buildings, scattered far and near,
Both great and small, magnificent and mean,
By their smooth roofs of shining silver white,
Spangling with brighter spots the bright expanse.
No sound, nor motion, of a living thing
The stillness breaks, but such as serve to soothe
Or cause the soul to feel the stillness more.
The yellow-hammer by the way-side picks,
Mutely, the thistle's seed; but in her flight,
So smoothly serpentine, her wings outspread
To rise a little, closed to fall as far,
Moving like sea-fowl o'er the heaving waves,
With each new impulse chimes a feeble note.
The russet grasshopper, at times, is heard,
Snapping his many wings, as half he flies,
Half hovers in the air. Where strikes the sun
With sultriest beams, upon the sandy plain,
Or stony mount, or in the close deep vale,
The harmless locust of this western clime,
At intervals, amid the leaves unseen,
Is heard to sing with one unbroken sound,
As with a long-drawn breath, beginning low,
And rising to the midst with shriller swell,
Then in low cadence dying all away.
Beside the stream collected in a flock,
The noiseless butterflies, though on the ground,
Continue still to wave their open fans
Powder'd with gold; while on the jutting twigs
The spindling insects that frequent the banks,
Rest, with their thin transparent wings outspread
As when they fly. Oft times, though seldom seen,
The cuckoo, that in summer haunts our groves,
Is heard to moan, as if at every breath
Panting aloud. The hawk in mid-air high,
On his broad pinions sailing round and round,
With not a flutter, or but now and then,
As if his trembling balance to regain,
Utters a single scream but faintly heard,
And all again is still. The cooling shade
The listless rambler seeks, perhaps beside
Sad willows planted round the garden pool,
Whose slender leaves and long untapering limbs
Hanging plumb down with gracefulness,
Drip with a constant shower of scattered drops
Hung from the spouting column in the midst;
Or in the forest by the clear cold rill,
That falls in short cascades as by thick steps
Down the long steep, mid slaty stones o'ergrown
With fresh green moss, beneath the umbrage dark
Of pine and fir: while oozing from the rocks
Trickle cold springs, and on the banks, the cups
Of flowers unsunned, day after day, retain
The rain of heaven. Here musing he reclines,
Cooled by the freshness, by the murmurs lulled,
And softly saddened by the verdant gloom.

At evening in the unfrequented door,
Fronting the west, he takes his wonted stand,
Leaning against the post with folded arms;
Or at his chamber window, open thrown,
He seats himself, his forehead bared to meet
Each cooling breeze, his elbow on the sill,
And his bare temple resting on his palm.
He looks abroad and much he finds to please
A soul depressed and sink it lower still.
The meadows are no longer spangled bright
As ere mid-summer, with the nightly swarms
Of fireflies thick, whose intermittent sparks
Direct the hands of childhood, following close
To catch them as they climb the blades of grass,
Or flit along the air. Now other swarms
Of various insects in the grass unseen,
Sooth with a dull monotony of sounds;
Some shriller than the rest in minute strains
Trilling alone; and some without a stop
All night prolonged in feeble plaintive tones
Continuous as the throbbings of the pulse
And similar as they. Far off and low in
The horizon, from a sultry cloud
Where sleeps in embryo the mid-night storm,
The silent lightning gleams in fitful sheets,
Illumes the solid mass, revealing thus
Its darker fragments, and its ragged verge;
Or if the bolder fancy so conceive
Of its fantastic forms, revealing thus
Its gloomy caverns, rugged sides and tops
With beetling cliffs grotesque. But not so bright
The distant flashes gleam as to efface
The window's image on the floor impressed,
By the dim crescent; or outshines the light
Cast from the room upon the trees hard by,
If haply to illume a moonless night
The lighted taper shine; though lit in vain
To waste away unused, and from abroad
Distinctly through the open window seen
Lone, pale, and still as a sepulchral lamp.

The sultry summer past, September comes,
Soft twilight of the slow-declining year.
All mildness, soothing loneliness and peace;
The fading season ere the falling come,
More sober than the buxom blooming May,
And therefore less the favorite of the world,
But dearest month of all to pensive minds.
Tis now far spent; and the meridian sun
Most sweetly smiling with attempered beams
Sheds gently down a mild and grateful warmth.
Beneath its yellow lustre groves and woods
Checkered by one night's frost with various hues,
While yet no wind has swept a leaf away,
Shine doubly rich. It were a sad delight
Down the smooth stream to glide, and see it tinged
Upon each brink with all the gorgeous hues,
The yellow, red, or purple of the trees
That singly or in tufts or forests thick
Adorn the shores; to see perhaps the side
Of some high mount reflected far below
With its bright colours, intermixed with spots
Of darker green. Yes it were sweetly sad
To wander in the open fields and hear
E'en at this hour, the noon-day hardly past,
The lulling insects of the summer's night;
To hear, where lately buzzing swarms were heard,
A lonely bee long roving here and there
To find a single flower, but all in vain;
Then rising quick and with a louder hum,
In widening circles round and round his head,
Straight by the listener flying clear away,
As if to bid the fields a last adieu;
To hear within the woodland's sunny side,
Late fall of music, nothing save perhaps
The sound of nut-shells by the squirrel dropt
From some tall beech fast falling through the leaves.

The sun now rests upon the mountain tops;
Begins to sink behind—is half concealed,
And now is gone: the last faint twinkling beam
Is cut in twain by the sharp rising ridge.
Sweet to the pensive is departing day
When only one small cloud so still and thin,
So thoroughly imbued with amber light,
And so transparent, that it seems a spot
Of brighter sky, beyond the farthest mount
Hangs o'er the hidden orb; or where a few
Long narrow stripes of denser, darker grain,
At each end sharpened to a needle's point
With golden borders, sometimes straight and smooth
And sometimes crinkling like the lightning stream,
A half hour's space above the mountain lie;
Or when the whole consolidated mass
That only threatened rain, is broken up
Into a thousand parts, and yet is one,
One as the ocean broken into waves;
And all its spongy parts, imbibing deep
The moist effulgence, seem like fleeces dyed
Deep scarlet, saffron light, or crimson dark,
As they are thick or thin, or near or more remote,
All fading soon as lower sinks the sun,
Till twilight end. But now another scene
To me most beautiful of all appears;
The sky without the shadow of a cloud
Throughout the west, is kindled to a glow
So bright and broad, it glares upon the eye,
Not dazzling but dilating with calm force
Its power of vision to admit the whole.
Below, 'tis all of richest orange dye,
Midway the blushing of the mellow peach
Paints not but tinges the etherial deep;
And here in this most lovely region shines
With added loveliness, the evening-star.
Above, the fainter purple slowly fades
Till changed into the azure of mid-heaven.

Along the level ridge o'er which the sun
Descended, in a single row arranged
As if thus planted by the hand of art,
Majestic pines shoot up into the sky,
And in its fluid gold seem half dissolved.
Upon a nearer peak, a cluster stands
With shafts erect and tops converged to one
A stately colonade with verdant roof;
Upon a nearer still, a single tree
With shapely form looks beautiful alone,
While farther northward through a narrow pass
Scooped in the hither range, a single mount
Beyond the rest, of finer smoothness seems,
And of a softer more etherial blue,
A pyramid of polished sapphire built.

But now the twilight mingles into one
The various mountains; levels to a plain
This nearer, lower landscape, dark with shade,
Where every object to my sight presents
Its shaded side; while here upon these walls
And in that eastern wood upon the trunks
Under thick foliage, reflective shows
Its yellow lustre. How distinct the line
Of the horizon parting heaven and earth.

In such a night, 'twould sadden mirth to hear
The lulling sound of distant waterfalls
By intervening hills so broke and spread
That whence it comes the ear no more discerns,
Seeming diffused alike on every side,
A gentle murmur filling all the air;
As if all nature charg'd with life intense,
Breathed softly in one universal sigh,
The thrilling tones of an Eolian harp
In such a night would half entrance the sad,
Its deep vibrations, shook from chords that quake
As with the touch of quiv'ring fingers hid
From mortal sight, would sink into the soul
And half persuade fond fancy that the hand
Of some departed sympathizing friend
Dearly beloved and deeply mourned, was there.

Now drowned in sweet repose are man and beast,
While swift and silent as on angel's wings
Time by them flies. [OMITTED]

'Tis midnight: o'er the marshy meadows rest
Damp vapours thin and pale; while overhead
Hangs far aloft beneath the firmament,
And just beneath, a cloudy canopy,
Milk-white and curdled in thick spots, oft called
The seeds of coming rain, but to the eye
Of fancy seeming like a flock of swans
In mid-air hovering still. All nature sleeps
Beneath a tranquillizing shower of light.
O what a night for grief to watch and weep.