English Poets of the Eighteenth Century · Chapter 11From Translation of the Iliad
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'How would the sons of Troy, in arms renowned, And Troy's proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground, Attaint the lustre of my former name, Should Hector basely quit the field of fame? My early youth was bred to martial pains, My soul impels me to th' embattled plains: Let me be foremost to defend the throne, And guard my father's glories and my own. Yet come it will, the day decreed by fates, (How my heart trembles while my tongue relates!) The day when thou, imperial Troy! must bend, And see thy warriors fall, thy glories end. And yet no dire presage so wounds my mind, My mother's death, the ruin of my kind, Not Priam's hoary hairs defil'd with gore, Not all my brothers gasping on the shore, As thine, Andromache! Thy griefs I dread: I see thee trembling, weeping, captive led, In Argive looms our battles to design, And woes of which so large a part was thine! To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring The weight of waters from Hyperia's spring! There, while you groan beneath the load of life, They cry, "Behold the mighty Hector's wife!" Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see, Embitters all thy woes by naming me. The thoughts of glory past and present shame, A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name! May I lie cold before that dreadful day, Pressed with a load of monumental clay! Thy Hector, wrapped, in everlasting sleep, Shall neither hear thee sigh, nor see thee weep.'
Thus having spoke, th' illustrious chief of Troy Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy. The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast, Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest. With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled, And Hector hasted to relieve his child; The glittering terrors from his brows unbound, And placed the beaming helmet on the ground. Then kissed the child, and, lifting high in air, Thus to the gods preferred a father's prayer:
'O thou! whose glory fills th' ethereal throne, And all ye deathless powers! protect my son! Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown, To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown, Against his country's foes the war to wage, And rise the Hector of the future age! So when, triumphant from successful toils, Of heroes slain he bears the reeking spoils, Whole hosts may hail him with deserved acclaim, And say, "This chief transcends his father's fame": While pleased, amidst the general shouts of Troy, His mother's conscious heart o'erflows with joy.'
He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms, Restored the pleasing burthen to her arms; Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid, Hushed to repose, and with a smile surveyed. The troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear, She mingled with the smile a tender tear. The softened chief with kind compassion viewed, And dried the falling drops, and thus pursued:
'Andromache! my soul's far better part, Why with untimely sorrows heaves thy heart? No hostile hand can antedate my doom, Till fate condemns me to the silent tomb. Fixed is the term to all the race of earth, And such the hard condition of our birth. No force can then resist, no flight can save: All sink alike, the fearful and the brave. No more—but hasten to thy tasks at home, There guide the spindle, and direct the loom; Me glory summons to the martial scene, The field of combat is the sphere for men. Where heroes war, the foremost place I claim, The first in danger as the first in fame.'
From AN ESSAY ON MAN
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot; Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man.
Say first, of God above, or man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? Of man, what see we but his station here From which to reason or to which refer? Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known, 'Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs. What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heaven has made us as we are. But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Looked through? or can a part contain the whole?
Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?
Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind? First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less? Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade? Or ask of yonder argent fields above, Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove.
Of systems possible, if 'tis confessed That wisdom infinite must form the best, Where all must full or not coherent be, And all that rises, rise in due degree; Then, in the scale of reasoning life, 'tis plain, There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man: And all the question (wrangle e'er so long) Is only this, if God has placed him wrong?
Respecting man, whatever wrong we call, May, must be right, as relative to all. In human works, though laboured on with pain, A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain; In God's, one single can its end produce; Yet serves to second too some other use. So man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
When the proud steed shall know why man restrains His fiery course, or drives him o'er the plains; When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod, Is now a victim, and now Egypt's god: Then shall man's pride and dulness comprehend His actions', passions', being's, use and end; Why doing, suffering, checked, impelled; and why This hour a slave, the next a deity.
Then say not man's imperfect, Heaven in fault; Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measured to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect In a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest to-day is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago.
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribed, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know Or who could suffer being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given, That each may fill the circle marked by Heaven: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore. What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blessed. The soul, uneasy and confined from home, Bests and expatiates in a life to come.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; His soul, proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk, or milky way; Yet simple nature to his hope has given, Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler Heaven; Some safer world in depths of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To be, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.
Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense Weigh thy opinion against Providence; Call imperfection what thou fanciest such, Say, 'Here he gives too little, there too much;' Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, 'If man's unhappy, God's unjust;' If man alone engross not Heaven's high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there, Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, Bejudge his justice, be the god of God. In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel: And who but wishes to invert the laws Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause.
V. Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ''Tis for mine: For me kind nature wakes her genial power, Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower; Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew; For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings; For me, health gushes from a thousand springs; Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.' But errs not Nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep? 'No ('tis replied), the first Almighty Cause Acts not by partial, but by general laws; Th' exceptions few; some change, since all began: And what created perfect?' Why then man? If the great end be human happiness, Then nature deviates; and can man do less? As much that end a constant course requires Of showers and sunshine, as of man's desires; As much eternal springs and cloudless skies, As men forever temperate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design, Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline? Who knows but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms; Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind, Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride, our very reasoning springs. Account for moral, as for natural things: Why charge we Heaven in those, in these acquit? In both, to reason right is to submit. Better for us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discomposed the mind. But all subsists by elemental strife; And passions are the elements of life. The general order, since the whole began, Is kept in nature, and is kept in man.
VI. What would this man? Now upward will he soar, And little less than angel, would he more; Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears. Made for his use all creatures if he call, Say what their use, had he the powers of all? Nature to these, without profusion, kind, The proper organs, proper powers assigned; Each seeming want compensated of course, Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force; All in exact proportion to the state; Nothing to add, and nothing to abate. Each beast, each insect, happy in its own: Is Heaven unkind to man, and man alone? Shall he alone, whom rational we call, Be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all? The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind; No powers of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. Say what the use, were finer optics given, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, To smart and agonize at every pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thundered in his opening ears, And stunned him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heaven had left him still The whispering zephyr, and the purling rill? Who finds not Providence all good and wise, Alike in what it gives and what denies?
VII. Far as creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental power ascends. Mark how it mounts, to man's imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass: What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, To that which warbles through the vernal wood: The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew? How instinct varies in the grovelling swine, Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine! 'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier, Forever separate, yet forever near! Remembrance and reflection how allied; What thin partitions sense from thought divide: And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass th' insuperable line! Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected, these to those, or all to thee? The powers of all subdued by thee alone, Is not thy reason all these powers in one?
VIII. See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high, progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach; from infinite to thee, From thee to nothing.—On superior powers Were we to pass, Inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed: From nature's chain whatever link you strike, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. And, if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to th' amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky; Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled, Being on being wrecked, and world on world; Heaven's whole foundations to their centre nod, And nature tremble to the throne of God. All this dread order break—for whom? for thee? Vile worm!—Oh, madness! pride! impiety!
IX. What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread, Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head? What if the head, the eye, or ear repined To serve mere engines to the ruling mind? Just as absurd for any part to claim To be another, in this general frame; Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains, The great directing Mind of all ordains. All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul; That, changed through all, and yet in all the same; Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame; Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent; Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, As the rapt seraph that adores and burns: To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
X. Cease then, nor order imperfection name: Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee. Submit.—In this, or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: Safe in the hand of one disposing Power, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.