Essay on Man | Page 5

blest to-day is as completely so,?As who began a thousand years ago.
III. 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 blest:?The soul, uneasy and confined from home,?Rests 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 depth 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.
IV. 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,?Re-judge 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;?The 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 for ever 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 be 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