NATURE TEACHING IMMORTALITY.
Nature, thy daughter, ever-changing birth
Of thee, the great Immutable, to man
Speaks wisdom; is his oracle supreme;
And he who most consults her is most wise.
Look nature through, ’tis revolution all.
All change, no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise, and set, and rise;
Earth takes th’ example. See the summer gay,
With her green chaplet, and ambrosial flow’rs,
Droops into pallid autumn; winter gray,
Horrid with frost, and turbulent with storm,
Blows autumn and his golden fruits away,
Then melts into the spring; soft spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,
Recalls the first. All to re-flourish fades,
As in a wheel all sinks to reascend;
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.
With this minute distinction, emblems just,
Nature revolves, but man advances; both
Eternal, that a circle, this a line;
That gravitates, this soars. Th’ aspiring soul,
Ardent and tremulous, like flame ascends,
Zeal and humility her wings, to heaven.
The world of matter, with its various forms,
All dies into new life. Life, born from death,
Rolls the vast mass, and shall for ever roll.
No single atom, once in being lost,
With change of counsel charges the Most High.
Matter immortal, and shall spirit die?
Above the nobler shall less noble rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
Now resurrection know! shall man alone,
Imperial man! be sown in barren ground,
Less privileg’d than grain on which he feeds?
Is man, in whom alone is power to prize
The bliss of being, or with previous pain
Deplore its period, by the spleen of fate,
Severely doom’d, death’s single unredeem’d?
Edward Young, 1681–1765.
