CXXXII.
A thousand dumb-voiced stars beseech our eyes
And lend a magic to the lonely night;
True world-historians of all hopes and sighs,
Might we but spell their story from your light.
Loves, hopes, philosophies, religions, powers,
Feed on themselves, quickened by their own fall:
And years but mock at years, and hours at hours,
Processions furnish soon their grandeur’s pall:
Even now ye gaze on hopes, that live in death,
On many a various god of wealth or pride,
On schemes, fated to fail, on learning’s breath,
Soon choked by dust, or blown by truth aside:
Ambition, strong to live, must feel decay;
What shall not fade? can priests or sages say?
CXXXIII.
Hark! what a voice comes crying through the night,
How does it thrill my too obsequious ears!
“O God, that knowledge should be wisdom hight,
And men should broadcast sow big-bellied years:”
Should a strong spirit descend, and wave his wand,
And gaze, and breathe inventions into life;
And fit all systems, with his dexterous hand,
Into a social perfectness from strife,—
’Twere much; and goodly heaven-descended Peace
Should sprout her blossoms, beautiful, o’er the land:
I question yet, if jars should wholly cease,
Or hatreds yield their once-accomplished stand:
An automaton world may merchandise, weave, spin;
Riches shall swell, not harmonise, its din.
CXXXIV.
Nay let your flight, Dædalean, touch far shores,
The utmost horizon where discovery tends!
Let Riches lavish their luxuriant stores,
Till Poverty gapes, wanting her wonted friends;
Let Rule, accomplished by adjustment’s mean,
Tune his mild precepts to benevolence;
Let knowledge thirst, and universal seem,
Say what, say wherefore, whither, and say whence;
Let ignorance crown with pride presumption’s vaunt,
And fruitless pages garner stores of praise;
Let social systems, smoothly-gliding, haunt
The wheels of state, whose barter smooths their ways:
Yet riches are life’s condiment, not life;
Peace is not love, but absence from the strife.