Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
but still in Israel's paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
1 Titan! to whose immortal eyes
2 The sufferings of mortality,
3 Seen in their sad reality,
4 Were not as things that gods despise;
5 What was thy pity's recompense?
6 A silent suffering, and intense;
7 The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
8 All that the proud can feel of pain,
9 The agony they do not show,
10 The suffocating sense of woe,
11 Which speaks but in its loneliness,
12 And then is jealous lest the sky
13 Should have a listener, nor will sigh
14 Until its voice is echoless.
15 Titan! to thee the strife was given
16 Between the suffering and the will,
17 Which torture where they cannot kill;
18 And the inexorable Heaven,
19 And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
20 The ruling principle of Hate,
21 Which for its pleasure doth create
22 The things it may annihilate,
23 Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
24 The wretched gift Eternity
25 Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
26 All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
27 Was but the menace which flung back
28 On him the torments of thy rack;
29 The fate thou didst so well foresee,
30 But would not to appease him tell;
31 And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
32 And in his Soul a vain repentance,
33 And evil dread so ill dissembled,
34 That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
35 Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
36 To render with thy precepts less
37 The sum of human wretchedness,
38 And strengthen Man with his own mind;
39 But baffled as thou wert from high,
40 Still in thy patient energy,
41 In the endurance, and repulse
42 Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
43 Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
44 A mighty lesson we inherit:
45 Thou art a symbol and a sign
46 To Mortals of their fate and force;
47 Like thee, Man is in part divine,
48 A troubled stream from a pure source;
49 And Man in portions can foresee
50 His own funereal destiny;
51 His wretchedness, and his resistance,
52 And his sad unallied existence:
53 To which his Spirit may oppose
54 Itself--and equal to all woes,
55 And a firm will, and a deep sense,
56 Which even in torture can descry
57 Its own concenter'd recompense,
58 Triumphant where it dares defy,
59 And making Death a Victory.
Stranger, approach! within this iron door
Thrice locked and bolted, this rude arch beneath
That vaults with ponderous stone the cell; confined
By man, the great magician, who controuls
Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm,
And bends the most remote and opposite things
To do him service and perform his will,
A giant sits; stern Winter; here he piles,
While summer glows around, and southern gales
Dissolve the fainting world, his treasured snows
Within the rugged cave.Stranger, approach!
He will not cramp thy limbs with sudden age,
Nor wither with his touch the coyest flower
That decks thy scented hair. Indignant here,
Like fettered Sampson when his might was spent
In puny feats to glad the festive halls
Of Gaza's wealthy sons; or he who sat
Midst laughing girls submiss, and patient twirled
The slender spindle in his sinewy grasp;
The rugged power, fair Pleasure's minister,
Exerts his art to deck the genial board;
Congeals the melting peach, the nectarine smooth,
Burnished and glowing from the sunny wall:
Darts sudden frost into the crimson veins
Of the moist berry; moulds the sugared hail:
Cools with his icy breath our flowing cups;
Or gives to the fresh dairy's nectared bowls
A quicker zest. Sullen he plies his task,
And on his shaking fingers counts the weeks
Of lingering Summer, mindful of his hour
To rush in whirlwinds forth, and rule the year.
1 When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
2 When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
3 When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
4 When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
5 How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
6 Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
7 In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
8 Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?