All pleasures and all hopes are their own scorn,
And man’s a measure, filling, never fill’d;
Who’d not sell life, its promise something worn,
For one week’s bliss with no awakening chill’d?
It cannot be; and some, foil’d or despis’d,
Or craving peace, life’s courted joys all spann’d,
Have scouted all things which the world e’er prized;
Dreaming of life, through the dead cloister scann’d,
Fair sounds this, luring; yet, methinks, that shows
A creed nor hard, nor healthy, which unscrews
The rivets, that should pin us to the throes,
That nature in begetting man renews:
The earthly mind, fed on unearthly leaven,
Diffuses Hell through earth, and earth through Heaven.
XLIX.
Who ponders on eternity, can draw
Its shadow o’er the strangeness of this earth,
And, quite immersed in future bliss, can store
His fancy’s dreams with fables of new birth;
And men have tortured, altering holiest phrase,
And sanctified the hopes which they adored;
Have made their souls more worthless than their praise,
Saying, that perfect love to Heaven outpoured,
Must hold its flood, nor risk the Heaven it decks,
Making love less lovely than the hope of bliss;
Fostering the demon Self, whose presence checks,
And dulls each noble prompting with his kiss.
Say ye, who steal the jewels from Heaven’s crown,
Where lies the rigour of Hell’s fancied frown?
L.
Heaven! ’tis a name, that as inconstant sways,
As fame or love, the changes of the moon,
Or, whatsoever wanders by dim ways
To a goal, fashioned by youth’s treacherous noon:
Heaven! ’tis a sound that in its uttering mocks
The hopes, reposing round that various base;
Adroitly differing, tempered to the shocks,
That mind the slow world of its desperate case!
The flattery of an echo from each heart,
A mirror, where each soul, reflected, shows
Unnatural choice of some unworthy part,
Which nature’s whole must loathingly depose:
Seek virtue for itself, or, seeking, lose
A Heaven apart, else Hell would Heaven confuse.
LI.
Life is a brook, that over pebbles glides,
And tints with colour of the cloud his wave;
Now, the East blazes, now, sad Phœbus slides
Down the red hills, that shroud him for his grave;
The waters now are calm, now, troubled, foam,
Exult on ridges, now o’er slopes decline,
Now, in their summer sprightliness, they roam,
Now, stand, congealed, in winter’s icy twine;
Full many a flower is often mirror’d there,
And the fresh grass, and the green shady trees,
Full many a pebble glistens through them, fair,
All in confusion, toss’d by wave and breeze;
’Tis strange, though many stones are form’d to fit,
Few meet their mates, most roll confus’dly knit.