English

1.

Ascend my Soul, and in a speedy Flight
Haste to the Regions of eternal Light;
Look all around, each dazling Wonder view,
And thy Acquaintance with past Joys renew.
Thro all th' Æthereal Plain extend thy Sight,
On ev'ry pleasing Object gaze;
On rolling Worlds below,
On Orbs which Light and Heat bestow:
And thence to their first Cause thy Admiration raise
In sprightly Airs, and sweet harmonious Lays.

1.

Accept, my God, the Praises which I bring,
The humble Tribute from a Creature due:
Permit me of thy Pow'r to sing,
That Pow'r which did stupendous Wonders do,
And whose Effects we still with awful Rev'rence view:
That mighty Pow'r which from thy boundless Store,
Out of thy self where all things lay,
This beauteous Universe did call,
This Great, this Glorious, this amazing All!
And fill'd with Matter that vast empty Space,

My straying thoughts, reduced stay,
And so a while retired,
Such observacions to survay
Which memory hath registred,
That were not in oblivion dead.

In which review of mentall store,
One note affordeth comforts best,
Cheifly to be preferd therfore,
As in a Cabinet or Chest
One jewell may exceed the rest.

God is the Rock of his Elect
In whom his grace is incoate,
This note, my soule did most affect,
It doth such power intimate
To comfort and corroberate.

God is a Rock first in respect

CHAPTER VII.

The mourners from the house of wo, the minstrels forth were gone;
Deep in the middle watch of night sate Miriam all alone,
Sleepless, in silent sorrow rocked, with fixed gaze intense
On him dressed for the grave, her last, still dear inheritance.
" Peace! " said a voice like the far-off soft murmur of a wave;
Starting she turned, she saw — " My child! my Judith from the grave! "

With lips apart, with heaving heart, gazed Miriam on a form

What though no eager yearnings ever pass
With curdled tremblings through the Sea of Glass
Serene, where dwell the spirits of the just;
Yet oft their wishful ghosts revisit here their dust.
Blood-spotted shadows; scarce from darkness won,
The untimely babe that never saw the sun,
Buried at midnight, yearning with dumb strife
For the enlarged capacities of life;
The suicide with stake-impaled breast,
That in his damned crossway cannot rest;
And things of guilt unknown, a thousand ghosts,

A brooding silence fills the twilight churchyard;
Not even the bat stirs from her cloistered rift,
Nor from her tree the downy-muffled owl,
To break the swooning and bewildered trance
A crowding stir begins; the uneasy Night
Seems big with gleams of something, restless, yearning,
As if to cast some birth of shape from out
Her hutching loins upon the waiting earth
The smothered throes are o'er, the birth is out
In glistering ghosts. Thinned and relieved, the air
Lends modulation to their spiritual meanings: —

Night the First.

U P rose a grieved ghost
From the churchyard's sunken host.
With a quick imperfect shriek,
Rose the thin embodied reek;
Like a thing pursued, it fled
From the kingdoms of the dead,
Through the green silent vales

VISION FOURTH .

That father died neglected, and in death
With struggling love were mingled bitter thoughts —
A Father's Curse
This, ere his head went down into the grave,
Dug in a corner where meek strangers lie,
Had upward sprung, a messenger succinct,
To trouble all the crystal range of Heaven,
To call on Hell, to post o'er seas and lands,
Nature to challenge in her last domain,

VISION THIRD .

There stood a ruined house!
In days of other years, perchance, within
Were beds of slumber, and the sacred hearth,
Children, and joy, and sanctifying grief,
A mother's lessons, and a father's prayers.
Where's now that good economy of life?
Scattered throughout the earth?
Or has it burst its bounds,

VISION SECOND .

The Bow was on the East:
One horn descending on a snow-white flock
Of lambs at rest upon a sleek hill-side,
The other showered its saffron and its blue
Down on a band of young girls in the vale,
Tossing their ringlets in their linked dance,
Laughing and winking to the glimmering sheen:
Through them and over them the glory fell,
Into the emerald meadow bending inward.
Beneath its arch,
Of beauty built, of promise, and of safety,