English Poets of the Eighteenth Century · Chapter 46John Gilbert Cooper
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
Hail, thrice hail! Ye solitary seats, where Wisdom seeks Beauty and Good, th' unseparable pair, Sweet offspring of the sky, those emblems fair Of the celestial cause, whose tuneful word From discord and from chaos raised this globe And all the wide effulgence of the day. From him begins this beam of gay delight, When aught harmonious strikes th' attentive mind; In him shall end; for he attuned the frame Of passive organs with internal sense, To feel an instantaneous glow of joy, When Beauty from her native seat of Heaven, Clothed in ethereal wildness, on our plains Descends, ere Reason with her tardy eye Can view the form divine; and through the world The heavenly boon to every being flows.
* * * * *
Nor less admire those things, which viewed apart Uncouth appear, or horrid; ridges black Of shagged rocks, which hang tremendous o'er Some barren heath; the congregated clouds Which spread their sable skirts, and wait the wind To burst th' embosomed storm; a leafless wood, A mouldering ruin, lightning-blasted fields; Nay, e'en the seat where Desolation reigns In brownest horror; by familiar thought Connected to this universal frame, With equal beauty charms the tasteful soul As the gold landscapes of the happy isles Crowned with Hesperian fruit: for Nature formed One plan entire, and made each separate scene Co-operate with the general of all In that harmonious contrast.
* * * * *
From these sweet meditations on the charms Of things external, on the genuine forms Which blossom in creation, on the scene Where mimic art with emulative hue Usurps the throne of Nature unreproved, On the just concord of mellifluent sounds; The soul, and all the intellectual train Of fond desires, gay hopes, or threatening fears, Through this habitual intercourse of sense Is harmonized within, till all is fair And perfect; till each moral power perceives Its own resemblance, with fraternal joy, In every form complete, and smiling feels Beauty and Good the same.