How little lovely here! How little known!
Small knowledge we dig up with endless toil;
And love unfeigned may purchase perfect hate.
Why starved on earth our angel appetites,
While brutal are indulged their fulsome fill?
Were then capacities divine conferred
As a mock diadem, in savage sport,
Rank insult of our pompous poverty,
Which reaps but pain from seeming claims so fair?
In future age lies no redress? And shuts
Eternity the door on our complaint?
If so, for what strange ends were mortals made!
The worst to wallow, and the best to weep;
The man who merits most, must most complain:
Can we conceive a disregard in Heaven
What the worst perpetrate or best endure?
This cannot be. To love, and know,
in man
Is boundless appetite, and boundless power:
And these demonstrate boundless objects,
too.
Objects, powers, appetites, Heaven suits
in all;
Nor, nature through, e’er violates
this sweet
Eternal concord, on her tuneful string.
Is man the sole exception from her laws?
Eternity struck off from human hope,
(I speak with truth, but veneration too)
Man is a monster, the reproach of Heaven,
A stain, a dark impenetrable cloud
On Nature’s beauteous aspect; and
deforms
(Amazing blot!) deforms her with her lord
If such is man’s allotment, what
is Heaven?
Or own the soul immortal, or blaspheme.
Or own the soul immortal, or invert
All order. Go, mock-majesty! go,
man!
And bow to thy superiors of the stall;
Through every scene of sense superior
far:
They graze the turf untilled; they drink
the stream
Unbrewed, and ever full, and unembittered
With doubts, fears, fruitless hopes, regrets,
despair.
Mankind’s peculiar! reason’s
precious dower!
No foreign clime they ransack for their
robes,
No brother cite to the litigious bar.
Their good is good entire, unmixed, unmarred;
They find a paradise in every field,
On boughs forbidden, where no curses hang:
Their ill no more than strikes the sense,
unstretched
By previous dread or murmur in the rear;
When the worst comes, it comes unfeared;
one stroke
Begins and ends their woe: they die
but once;
Blessed incommunicable privilege! for
which
Proud man, who rules the globe and reads
the stars,
Philosopher or hero, sighs in vain.
Account for this prerogative in brutes:
No day, no glimpse of day, to solve the
knot
But what beams on it from eternity.
O sole and sweet solution! that unties
The difficult, and softens the severe;
The cloud on Nature’s beauteous
face dispels,
Restores bright order, easts the brute
beneath,
And re-enthrones us in supremacy
Of joy, e’en here. Admit immortal
life,
And virtue is knight-errantry no more:
Each virtue brings in hand a golden dower
Far richer in reversion: Hope exults,
And, though much bitter in our cup is
thrown,
Predominates and gives the taste of Heaven.