Is more than midnight darkness on the soul,
Which sleeps beneath it, on a precipice, 680
Puff’d off by the first blast, and lost for ever.
Dost ask, Lorenzo, why so warmly press’d,
By repetition hammer’d on thine ear,
The thought of death? That thought is the machine,
The grand machine, that heaves us from the dust,
And rears us into men. That thought, plied home,
Will soon reduce the ghastly precipice
O’er-hanging hell, will soften the descent,