·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.

·QUEEN MAB.
BY
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY:
London:
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY R. CARLILE,
55, FLEET STREET.
1822

·No text on this page.

·TEL
HUTT
RP,
prio
LIB GART
1859
Queen Mab.
I
How wonderful is Deatb,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When throned on ocean's wave
It blushes o'er the world :
Yet both so passing wonderful!
Hath then the gloomy Power
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres
Scized on her sinless soul?
Must then that peerless form
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, those azure veins
Which steal lihe streams along a field of snow,
That lovely outline, which s fair
As breathing marble, perish?
Must putrefaction's breath

·4 QUEEN MAB. Leave nothing of this heavenly sight But loathsomeness and ruin? Spare nothing but a gloomy theme, On wbich the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it only a sweet slumber Stealing o'er sensation, Which the breath of roseate morning Chaseth into darkness? Will Ianthe wake again, And give that faithful bosom joy Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch Light, life, and rapture from her smile? Yes! she will wake again, Although her glowing limbs are motionless, And silent those sweet lips, Once breathing eloquence That might have soothed a tyger's rage, Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror. Her dewy eyes are closed, And on their lids, whose texture fine Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath, The baby Sleep is pillowed : Her golden tresses shade The bosom's stainless pride, Curling like tendrils of the parasites Around a marble column. Hark! whence that rushing sound? 'Tis like the wondrous strain That round a lonely ruin swells, ·I. QUEEN MAB. 5 Which, wandering on the echoing shore, The enthusiast hears at evening: 'Tis softer than the west wind's sigb; 'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes Of that strange lyre whose strings The genji of the breezes sweep: Those lines of rainbow light Are like the moonbeams when they fall Through some cathedral window, but the teints Are such as may not find Comparison on earth. Behold the cbariot of the Fairy Queen! Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air; Their filmy pennons at her word they furl, And stop obedient to the reins of light: These the Queen of Spells drew in, She spread a charm around the spot, And leaning graceful from the ethereal car, Long did she gaze, and silently, Upon the slumbering maid. Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams, When silvery clouds float throngh the wildered brain, When every sight of lovely, wild, and grand, Astonishes, enraptures, elevates, Wben fancy, at a glance, combines The wondrous and the beautiful, So bright, so fair, so wild a shape Hath ever yet beheld, ·6 QUEEN MAB. 1. As that which reined the coursers of the air, And poured the magic of her gaze Upon the maiden's sleep. The broad and yellow moon Shone dimly through her form That form of faultless symmetry; The pearly and pellucid car Moved not the moonlight's lige: 'Twas not an earthly pageant: Those who had looked upon the sight, Passing all human glory, Saw not the yellow moon, Saw not the mortal scene, Heard not the night-wind's rush, Heard not an earthly sound, Saw but the fairy pageant, Heard but the heaveoly strains That filled the lonely dwelling. The Fairy's frame was slight, yon fibrous cloud, That catches but the palest tinge of even, And which the straining eye can hardly seize When melting into eastern twilight's shadow, Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star That gems the glittering coronet of morn, Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful, As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form, Spread a purpureal balo round the scene, Yet with an undulating motion, Swayed to her outline gracefully.

·I. QUEEN MAB. From her celestial car The Fairy Queen descended, And thrice she waved her wand Circled with wreaths of amaranth : Her thin and misty form Moved with the moving air, And the clear silver tones, As thus she spoke, were such As are unheard by all but gifted ear. FAIRY. Stars! your balmiest influence shed ! Elements! your wratb suspend ! Sleep, Ocean, in the rocky bounds That circle thy domaio! Let not a breath be seen to stir Around yon grass-grown ruins height, Lel even the restless gossamer Sleep on the moveless air! Sonl of lanthe! thou, Judged alone worthy of the envied boon, That waits the good and the sincere; that waits Those who have struggled, and with resolute will Vanquished earth's pride and meanness, hursts the chaius, The icy chains of custom, and have shone The day-stars of their age;--Soul of Ianthe! Awake! arise ! Sudden arose lantbe's Soul; it stood ·8 QUEEN MAR. 1. All beautiful in naked purity, The perfect semblance of its bodily frame. Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace, Each stain of earthliness Had passed away, it reassumed Its native dignity, and stood Immortal amid ruin. Upon the couch the body lay Wrapl in the depth of slumber: Its features were fixed and meaningless, Yet animal life was there, And every organ yet performed Its natural functions: 'twas a sight Of wonder to behold the body and soul. The self-same lineaments, the same Marks of identity were there : Yet, oh, how different! One aspires to Heaven, Pants for its sempiternal heritage, And ever-changiug, ever-rising still, Wantons in endless being. The other, for a time the unwilling sport Of circumstance and passion, struggles on; Fleets through its sad duration rapidly: Then like an useless and worn-out machine, Rots, perishes, and passes. FAIRY. Spirit! who hast dived so deep; Spirit! who hast soared so bigh;

·I.
QUEEN MAB.
Thou the fearless, thou the mild,
Accept the boon thy worth hath earned,
Ascend the car with me.
SPIRIT.
Do I dream? Is this new feeling
But a visioned ghost of slumber?
If indeed I am a soul,
A free, a disembodied soul,
Speak again to me.
FAIRY.
I am the Fairy MAB: to me 'tis given
The wonders of the human world to keep:
The secrets of the immeasurable past,
In the unfailing consciences of men,
Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find :
The future, from the causes which arise
In each event, I gather: not the sting
Which retributive memory implants
In the hard bosom of the selfish man ;
Nor that extatic and exulting throb
Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up
The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day,
Are unforeseen, unregistered by me:
And it is yet permitted nie, to rend
The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit
Clothed in its changeless purity, may know
How soonest to accomplish the great end
$

·10 QUEEN MAB, 1. For which it hath its being, and may taste That peace, which in the end all life will share. This is the meed of virtue; happy Soul, Ascend the car with me! The chains of earth's immurement Fell from Ianthe's spirit; They shrank and break like bandages of straw Beneath a wakened giant's strength. She knew her glorious change, And felt in apprehension uncontrolled New raptures opening round: Each day-dream of her mortal liſe, Each frenzied vision of the slumbers That closed each well-spent day, Seemed now to meet reality. The Fairy and the Soul proceeded ; The silver clouds disparted ; And as the car of magic they ascended, Again the speechless music swelled, Again the coursers of the air Unfurled their azure pennons, and the Queen Shaking the beamy reins Bade them pursue their way. The magic car moved on. The night was fair, and countless stars Studded heaven's dark blue vault -- Just o'er the eastern wave Peeped the first faint smile of morn:- ·I. QUEEN MAB, 11 The magic car moved on- From the celestial hoofs The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew, And where the burning wheels Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak, Was traced a line of lightning. Now it flew far above a rock, The utmost verge of earth, The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow Lowered o'er the silver seà. Fiir, far below the chariot's path, Calm as a slumbering babe, Tremendous Ocean lay. The mirror of its stillness shewed The pale and waning stars, The chariot's fery track, And the grey light of morn Tinging those fleecy clouds That canopied the dawn, Seemed it, that the chariot's way Lay through the midst of an immense concave, Radiant with million constellatious, tinged With shades of infinite colour, And semicircled with a belt Flashing incessant meteors. The magic car moved on. As they approached their goal The coursers seemed to gather speed ; The sea no louger was distinguished; earth ·12 QUEEN MAB. I. Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere; The sun's unclouded orb Rolled through the black concave; Its rays of rapid light Parted around the cbariot's swifter course, And fell, like ocean's feathery spray Dashed from the boiling surge Before a vessel's prow. The magic car moved on. Earth's distant orb appeared The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven; Whilst round the chariot's way Innumerable systems rolled, And countless spheres diffused An ever-varying glory. It was a sight of wonder: some Were horned like the crescent moon; Some shed a mild and silver beam Like Hesperus o'er the western sea; Some dash'd athwart with trains of flame, Like worlds to death and ruin driven; Some shone like sans, and as the chariot passed, Eclipsed all other light. Spirit of Nature! here! In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple. Yet not the lightest leaf

·I.
QUEEN MAB.
13
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee:
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.
Spirit of Nature! thou !
Imperishable as this scene,
Here is thy fitting temple.

·14
QUEEN MAR.
II.
II.
If solitude hath ever led thy steps
To the wild ocean's echoing shore,
And thou hast lingered there,
Until the sun's broad orb
Seemed resting on the burnished wave,
Thou must have marked the lines
Of purple gold, that motionless
Hung o'er the sinking sphere:
Thou must have marked the billowy clouds
Edged with intolerable radiancy
Towering like rocks of jet
Crowned with a dianiond wreath.
And yet there is a moment,
When the sun's highest point
Peeps like a star o'er ocean's western edge,
When those far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sca;
Then bas thy fancy soared above the earth,
And furled its wearied wing
Within the Fairy's fane.
Yet not the golden islands
Gleaming in yon flood of light,

·II. QUEEN MAB. 15 Nor the feathery curtains Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch, Nor the burnished ocean waves Paving that gorgeous dome, So fair, so wonderful a sight As Mab's ethereal palace could afford. Yet likest evening's vault, that faery Hall ! As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread Its floors of flashing light, Its vast and azure dome, Its fertile golden islands Floating on a silver sea; Whilst suns their mingling bcamings darted Through clouds of circumambient darkness, And pearly battlements around Looked o'er the immense of Heaven. The inagic car no longer moved. The Fairy and the Spirit Entered the Hall of Spells: Those golden clouds That rolled in glittering billows Beneath the azure canopy With the ethereal footsteps, trembled not: The light and crimson mists, Floating to strains of thrilling melody Through that unearthly dwelling, Yielded to every movement of the will. Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned, And, for the varied bliss that pressed around, Used not the glorious privilege Of virtue and of wisdom.

·16 QUEEN NAB. II. Spirit! the Fairy said, And pointed to the gorgeous dome, This is a wondrous sight And inocks all human grandeur; But, were it virtuc's only meed, to dwell In a celestial palace, all resigned To pleasurable impulses, immured Within the prison of itself, the will Of changeless nature would be unfulfilled. Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come! This is thine high reward :--the past shall rise; Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach The secrets of the future. The Fairy and the Spirit Approached the overhanging battlement.- Below lay stretched the universe! There, far as the remotest line That bounds imagination's flight, Countless and unending orbs In mazy motion intermingled, Yet still fulfilled immutably Eternal nature's law. Above, below, around The circling systems formed A wilderness of barmony; Each with undeviating aim, In eloquent silence, through the depths of space Pursued its wondrous way.

·II. QUEEN MAB, 1n There was a little light That twinkled in the misty distance : None but a spirit's eye Migbt ken that rolling orb; None but a spirit's eye, And in no other place But that celestial dwelling, might behold Each action of this earth's inhabitants. But matter, space, and time In those aërial mansions cease to act; And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds Those obstacles, of which an earthly soul Fears to attempt the conquest. The Fairy pointed to the earth. The Spirit's intellectual eye Its kindred beings recognized. The thronging thousands, to a passing view, Seemed like an anthill's citizens. llow wonderful! that even The passions, prejudices, interests, That sway the meanest being, the weak touch That moves the finest nerve, And in one human brain Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link In the great chain of nature. Behold, the Fairy cried. Palmyra's ruined palaces! Behold! where grandeur frowned; 2 ·18 QUEEN MAB. II. Behold! where pleasure smiled; What now remains ? - the memory Of senselessness and shame What is immortal there? Nothing-it stands to tell A melancholy tale, to give An awful warning: soon Oblivion will steal silently The remuant of its fame. Monarchs and conquerors there Proud o'er prostrate millions trod- The earthquakes of the human race; Like them, forgotten when the ruin That marks their shock is past. Beside the eternal Nile, The Pyramids bave risen. Nile shall pursue his changeless way: Those pyramids shall fall; Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell The spot whereon they stood; Their very scite shall be forgotten, As is their builder's name! Behold yon sterile spot; Where now the wandering Arab's tent Flaps in the desert blast. There once old Salem's haughty fane Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes, And in the blushing face of day Exposed its shameful glory.

·II. QUEEN MAB. 19 Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed The building of that fane; and many a father, Worn out with toil and slavery, implored The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth, And spare his children the detested task Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning The choicest days of life, To svolhe a duiaru's rauity. Their an inhuman and uncultur. d race Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God; They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb The unborn child.---old age and infancy Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms Left not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends : But what was he who taught them that the God Of nature and benevolence bad given special sanction to the trade of blood ? His name and theirs are fading, and the tales of this barbarian nation, which imposture Recites till terror credits, are pursuing Itself into forgetfulness. Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood, There is a moral desart now: The mean and miserable huts, The yet more wretched palaces, Contrasted with those ancient fanes, Now crumbling to oblivion; T'he long and lonely colonnades, Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks, Seem like a well-known tune, ·20 QUEEN MAB. 11. Which, in some dear scene we have loved to hear, Remembered now in sadness. But, oh! how much more changed, How gloomier is the contrast Of human nature there! Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave, A coward and a fool, spreads death around- Then, shuddering, meets his own. Where Cicero and Antoninus lived, A cowled and hypocritical monk Prays, curses, and deceives. Spirit! ten thousand years Have scarcely past away, Since, in the waste where now the savage drinks His enemy's blood, and aping Europe's sons, Wakes the unholy song of war, Arose a stately city, Metropolis of the western continent: There, now, the mossy column-stone, Indented by time's uprelaxing grasp, Which once appeared to brave All, save its country's ruid; There the wide forest scene, Rude in the uncultivated loveliness Of gardens long run wild, Seems, to the unwilling sojourner, whose steps Chance in that desart has delayed, Thus to have stood since earth was what it is. Yet once it was the busiest haunt, Whither, as to a common centre, flocked ·II. QUEEN MAB. 21 Strangers, and ships, and merchandize : Once peace and freedom blest The cultivated plain : But wealth, tbat curse of man, Blighted the bud of its prosperity: Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty, Fled, to return not, until man shall know That they alone can give the bliss Worthy a soul that claims Its kindred with eternity. There's not one atom of yon earth But once was living nan; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in its thinnest cloud, But flowed in human veins: • And from the burning plains Where Lybian monsters yell, From the most gloomy glens Of Greenland's sunless clime, To where the golden fields Of fertile Eogland spread Their harvest to the day, Thou canst not find one spot Whereon no city stood." How strange is human pride! I tell thee that those living things, To whom the fragile blade of grass, That springeth in the moru And perisheth ere noou, ·22 QUEEN MAB, II. Is an unbounded world; I tell thee that those viewless beings, Whose mansion is the smallest particle Of the inipassive atmosphere, Think, feel, «?^1 live like man; That their affectious and antipathies, Like his, produce the laws Ruling their moral state; And the minutest throb That through their frame diffuses I he slightest, faintest motion, Is fixed and indispensable As the majestic laws That rule yon rolling orbs. The Fairy paused. The Spirit, In extacy of admiration, felt All knowledge of the past revived; the events of old and wondrous tinies, Which dim tradition interruptedly Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded In just perspective to the view; Yet dim from their infinitude. The Spirit seemed to stand High on an isolated pinnacle; The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe Above, and all around Nature's unchangiog harmony.

·III.
QUEEN MAB.
23
II.
FAIRY! the Spirit said,
And on the Queen of Spells
Fixed her ethereal eyes,
I thank thee. Thou hast given
A boon which I will not resign, and taught
A lesson not to be unlearned. I know
The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by bis errors, and derive
Experience from his folly :
For, when the power of imparting joy
Is eqnal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.
MAB.
Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!
Much yet remains unscanned.
Tbou knowest bow great is man,
Thou knowest his imbecility :
Yet learn thou what he is;
Yet learn the lofty destiny
Which restless time prepares
For every living soul.

·24 QUEEN MAB. III. Behold a gorgeous palace, that, anid Yon populous city, rears its thousand towers And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops Of centinels, in stern and silent ranks, Encompass it around: the dweller there Cannot be free and happy; hearest thou not The curses of the fatherless, the groans Of those who have no friend ? Ile passes on: The King, the wearer of a gilded chain That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites that man Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles At the deep curses which the destitute Mutter in secret, and a sulleu joy Pervades his bloodless beart when thousands groan But for those morsels which his wantonuess Wastes ia unjoyous revelry, to save All that they love from famine: wben be hears The tale of horror, to some ready-made face Of hypocritical assent he turns, Smothering the glow of sbame, that, spite of bim, Flushes his bloated cbeek. Now to the meal Of silence, grandeur, and excess, he drags His palled unwilling appetite. If gold, Gleaming around, and numerous viands culled From every clime, could force the loathing sense To overcome satiety, --if wealth The spring it draws from poisons not, or vice, ·INI. QUEEN MAR, 25 Unfeeling, stubborn vice, converteth not Its food to deadliest venom; then that king Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils His unforced task, when be returns at even, And by the blazing faggot meets again Her welcome for wbom all his toil is sped, Tastes not a sweeter meal. Behold bini now Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brain Reels dizzily a wbile: Bit, ah! too soon The slumber of intemperance subsides, And conscicnce, that undying serpent, calls Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task. Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye- Oh! mark that deadly visage. KING. No cessation! Oh! must this last for ever! Awful death, I wish, yet fear to clasp thee!--Not one monsent Of dreamless sleep! O dear and blessed peace! Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity In penury and dungeons? wherefore lurkest With danger, death, and solitude; yet shuuu'st The palace I have built thee? Sacred peace! Oh visit me but once, but pitying shed One drop of balm upon my withered soul. Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart, And peace defileth not her suowy robes ·26 QUEEN MAB. III. In such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters; His slumbers are but varied agonies, They prey like scorpions on the springs of life. There needetb not the hell that bigots frame To punish those who err : earth in itself Contains at once the evil and the cure; And all-sufficing nature can chastise Those who transgress her law,—she only knows How justly to proportion to the fault The punishment it merits. Is it strange That this poor wretch should pride him in bis woe? Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug The scorpion that consumes him ? Is it strange That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns, Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured Within a splendid prison, whose stern bounds Shut him from all that's good or dear on earth, His soul asserts vot its humanity ? That man's mild nature rises not in war Against a king's employ? No—'tis not strange. Ile, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts and lives Just as his father did; the unconquered powers Of precedent and custom interpose Between a king and virtue. Stranger yet, To those who know not nature, nor deduce The future from the present, it may seem, That not one slave, wbo suffers from the crimes Of this unnatural being ; not one wretch, Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bed ·III. QUEEN MAB, 27 In earth's unpitying bosom, rears an arm To dash him from his throne! Those gilded flies That, basking in the sunshine of a court, Fatten on its corruption! --what are they? -The drones of the community; they feed On the mechanic's labour: the starved hind For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield Its unshared harvests; and yon squalid form, Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes A sunless life in tbe unwholesome mine, Drags out in labour a protracted death, To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil, That few may know the cares and woe of sloth. Whence, thinkest tbou, kings and parasites arose ? Whence that unnatural line of drones, who beap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread ?-From vice, black luathsoine vice; From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong ; From all that genders miscry, and makes Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust, Revenge, and murder......And when reason's voice, Loud as the voice of nature, shall have waked The nations, and mankind perceive that vice Is discord, war, and misery; that virtue Is peace, and happiness, and harmony; When man's maturer nature shall disdain The playthings of its childhood ;-kingly glare ·28 QUEEN MAB. III. Will lose its power to dazzle; its authority Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne Shall stand unnoticed in the regal ball, Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood's trade Shall be as bateful and unprofitable As that of truth is now. Where is the ſame Which the vain-glorious mighty of the earth Seek to eternize? Oh! the faintest sound From time's light footfall, the minutest wave That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothing The unsubstantial bubble. Aye! to-day Stern is the tyrant's mandate, red the gaze That flashes desolation, strong the arm That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes ! That mandate is a thunder-peal that died In ages past; that gaze, a transient flash On which the midnight closed, and on that arm The worm has made bis meal. The virtuous man, Who, great in bis humility, as kings Are little in their grandeur; he who leads Invincibly a life of resolute good, And stands amid the silent dungeon-depths More free and fearless than the trembling judge, Who, clothed in venal power, vainly strove To bind the impassive spirit;-when he falls, His mild eye beams benevolence no more: Withered tbe band outstretcbed but to relieve;

·III. QUEEN MAB. 29 Sunk reason's simple eloquence that rolled But to appal the guilty. Yes! the grave Hath quenched that eye, and death's relentless frost Withered that arm: but the unfading fame Which virtue hangs upon its votary's tomb; The deathless memory of that man, wi.om kings Call to their mind and tremble; the remembrance With which the happy spirit contemplates Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth, Shall never pass away. Nature rejects the monarcb, not the man; The subject not the citizen: for kings And subjects, mutual foes, for ever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. When Nero, High over flaming Rome, with sevage joy Lowered like a fiend, drank with enraptured ear The shrieks of agonizing death, beheld The frightful desolation spread, and felt A new created sense withiu his soul Thrill to the sight, and vibrate to the sound; Thinkest thou his grandeur had not overcome ·30 QUEEN MAB. III. The force of human kindness? and, when Rome, With one stern blow, hurled not the tyrant down, Crushed not the arm red with her dearest blood, Had not submissive abjectness destroyed Nature's suggestions? he raiseth up Look on yonder earth : The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees, Arise in due succession; all things speak Peace, harmony, aud love. The universe, lo nature's silent eloquence, declares That all fulfil the works of love and joy,- All but the outcast man. He fabricates The sword which stabs his peace; he cherisheth The snakes that guaw bis heart; The tyrant, whose delight is in his woe, Whose sport is in his agony. Yon sun, Lights it the great alone? Yon silver beams, Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch, Than on the dome of kings? Is mother earth A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil; A mother only to those puling babes Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men The playthings of their baby hood, and ipar, In self-important childishness, that peace Which men alone appreciate ? Spirit of Nature! no. The pure diffusion of thy essence throbs

·III.
QUEEN MAB.
31
Alike in every human heart.
Thou, aye, erectest there
Thy throne of power unappealable:
Thou art the judge beneath whose nod
Man's brief and frail authority
Is powerless as the wind
That passeth idly by.
Tbine the tribunal which surpasseth
The shew of hunan justice,
As God surpasses man.
Spirit of Nature! thou
Life of interminable multitudes;
Soul of those mighty spheres
Whose changeless paths thro' Heaven's deep silence lie;
Soul of that smallest being,
The dwelling of whose life
Is one faint April sun-gleam;
Man, like these passive things,
Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth :
Like theirs, his age of endless peace,
Which time is fast maturing,
Will swiftly, surely come;
And the unbounded frame, which thou pervadest,
Will be without a flaw
Marring its perfect symmetry.

·32
QUEEN MAB.
IV.
IV.
How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,
Which verval zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,
Were discord to the speaking quietude
That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love had spread
To curtain her sleeping world. You gentle bills,
Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;
Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend,
So stainless, that their white and glittering spires
Tinge not the moon's pure beam; yon castled steej",
Wbose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower
So idly, that rapt fancy deemeth it
metaphor of peace;-all form a scene
Where musing solitude might love to lift
Her soul above this sphere of earthliness;
Where silence undisturbed might watch alone,
So cold, so bright, so still.
The orb of day,
In southern clines, o'er ocean's waveless field
Sinks sweetly smiling: not the faintest breath
Steals o'er the unruffled deep; the clouds of eve

·IV. QUEEN MAB. 33 Reflect unmoved the lingering beam of day; And vesper's image on the western main Is beautifully still. To-morrow comes : Cloud upon cloud, in dark and deepening mass, Roll o'er the blackened waters; the deep roar Of distant thunder mutters awfully; Tempest unfolds its pinion o'er the gloom That shrouds the boiling surge; the pityless fiend, With all his winds and lightnings, tracks his prey; The torn deep yawns,—the vessel finds a grave Beneath its jagged gulf. Ab! whence yon glare That fires the arch of heaven ?-that dark red smoke Blotting the silver moon? The stars are quenched In darkness, and the pure and spaugling snow Gleams faintly through the gloom-tbat gathers round! Hark to that roar, whose swift and deafening peals Iņ countless echoes through the mountains ring, Startling pale midnight on her starry throne! Now swells the intermingling diu; the jar Frequent and frightful of the bursting bomb; The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout, The ceaseless clangour, and the rush of men Inebriate with rage:-loud, and more loud The discord grows; till pale death shuts the scene, And o'er the conqueror and the conquered draws His cold and bloody sbroud. Of all the men Whom day's departing beam saw blooming there, In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts That beat with anxious life at sun-set there; 3 ·QUEEN AAB. IV. How few survive, low few are beating now! All is deep silence, like the fearful cal.nl Thut slunbers in the storms portentous pause; Save when the frantic wail of widowed love Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moan With which some soul bursts from the frame of clay Wrapt round its struggling powers. The grey moru Dawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke Before the icy wind slow rolls away, And the bright beams of frosty morning dance Along the spaugling snow. There tracks of blood Even to the forest's depth, and scatter'd arms, And lifeless warriors, whose hard liueanents Death's sell could change not, mark the drcadful path Of the outsallying victors: far behind, Black ashes note where their proud city stood. Within yon forest is a gloomy glen- Each tree which guards its darkness from the day, Waves o'er a warrior's tomb. 1 I see thee shrink, Surpassing Spirit!-- wert thou hupan else? I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet Across thy stainless features: yet fear not; This is no unconnected misery, Nor stands uncaused, and irretrievable. Man's evil nature, that apology Which kings who rule, and cowards who crouch, set up For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood v ·iv. QUEEN MAB. 35 Which desolates the discord-wasted land. From kings, and priests, and statesınen, war arose, Whose safety is man's deep unbettered woe, Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axe Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall; And where its venomed exhalations spread Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay Quenching the serpent's famine, and their bones Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast, A garden shall arise, in loveliness Surpassing fabled Eden. Hath Nature's soul, That formed this world so beautiful, that spread Earth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chord Strung to unchangiug unison, that gave The bappy birds their dwelling in the grove, That yielded to the wanderers of the deep The lovely silence of the unfathomed main, And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust With spirit, thought, and love; on Man alone, Partial in canseless malice, wantonly Ileaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul Blasted with withering curses; placed aſar The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp, But serving on the frightful gulph to glare, Rent wide bencath his footsteps ? Nature!-no! Kings, priests, and statesmen, blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts ·36 QUEEN MAB. IV. Like subtle poisotbrough the bloodless veins Of desolate society. The child, Ere he can lisp his mother's sacred name, Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and liſts His baby-sword even in a hero's mood. This infant-arm becomes the bloodiest scourge of devastated earth; whilst specious names, Learnt in soft childhood's unsuspecting hour, Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims Bright reason's ray, and sanctifies the sword Upraised to shed a brother's innocent blood. Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood bang even o'er the cradled babe, Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good. Ah! to the stranger-soul, when first it peeps From its new tenement, and looks abroad For happiness and sympathy, how stern And desolate a tract is this wide world! How withered all the buds of natural good! No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms Of pity less power! On its wretched frame, Poisoned, perchance, by the discase and woe Heaped on the wretched parent whence it sprung By morals, law, and custom, the pure winds Of heaven, that renovate the insect tribes, May breathe not. The unlainting light of day May visit not its longings. It is bound Ere it bas life: yea, all the chains are forged Long ere its being: all liberty and love ·IV. QUEEN MAB. 37 And peace is torn from its defencelessness; Cursed from its birth, even from its cradle doomed To abjectness and bondage! Throughout this varied and eternal world Soul is the only element, the block That for uncounted ages bas remained. The moveless pillar of a mouutain's weight Is active, living spirit. Every grain Is sentient both in unity and part, And the minutest atom comprehends A world of loves and hatreds; these beget Evil and good: hence truth, and falsebood spring; Hence will, and thought, and action, all the germs Of pain or pleasure, sympathy or bate, That variegate the eternal universe. Soul is not more polluted than the beams Of heaven's pure orb, ere round their rapid lines The taint of earth-born atmospheres arise. Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds Of high resolve, on fancy's boldest wing To soar un wearied, fearlessly to turn The kceuest pangs to peacefulness, and taste The joys which mingled sense and spirit yield. Or he is formed for abjectuess and woe, To grovel on the dungbill of his fears, To shrink at every sound, to quench the flame Of natural love in sensualism, to know That hour as blest when on his worthless days The frozen hand of death shall set its seal, Yet fear the cure, though hating the disease.

·38 QUEEN MAB, IV. The one is man that shall hereafter be; The other, man as vice has made him now. War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade, And, to those royal murderers, whose mean thrones Are bought by crinies of treachery and gore, The bread they eat, the staif on which they lean. Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surround Their palaces, participate the crimes That force defends, and from a nation's rage Secures the crown, which all the curses reach That famine, frenzy, woe, and penury brcathe. These are the hired bravos who defend The tyrant's throne-the bullies of his fear: These are the sinks and channels of worst vice, The refuse of society, tlie dregs Of all tbat is most vile: their cold hearts blend Deceit with sternness, ignorance with pride, All that is mean and villainous, with rage Which hopelessness of good, and self-contempt, Alone might kindle; they are decked in wealth, Honour and power, then are sent abroad To do their work. The pestilence that stalks In gloomy triumph through some eastern land Is less destroying. They cajole with gold, And promises of fame, the thonghtless youth Already crushed with servitude: he knows His wretchedness too late, and cherishes Repentance for his ruin, when his duoin Is sealed in gold and blood!

·IV. QUEEN MAB. 39 Those loo the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare The feet of justice in the toils of law, Stand, ready to oppress the weier still ; And, right or wroug, will vindicate for gold, Sneering at public virtue, which beneath Their pityless tread lies torn and trampled, where Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth. Then grave and boary-headed liypocrites, Without a hope, a passion, or a love, Who, through a life of luxury and lics, Ilave crept by flattery to the seats of power, Support the system where their honours flow.... They have three words:-well tyrants know their use, Well pay them for the loan, with usury Torn from a bleerling work !-God, lleil, and leaven. Avengeril, pityless, and almighty fiend, Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage Of tameless tygers hungering for blood. Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire, Where poisonous and undying worms prolong Eternal misery to those bapless slaves li bose life has been a penance for its crimes. And Ileaven, a meed for those who dare belie Their human nature, quake, believe, and criage Before the muckeries of carthly power. These tools the tyrant tempers to his work, Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys, Omnipotent in wickedness: the while Youth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely does ·40 QUEEN MAB. IV. His bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lend Force to the weakness of his trembling arm. They rise, they fall; one generation comes Yielding its harvest to destruction's scythe. It fades, another blossoms, yet behold! Red glows the tyrant's stamp-mark on its bloom, Withering and cankering deep its passire prime. He has invented lying words and modes, Enıply and vain as his own coreless heart; Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound, To lure the heedless victim to the toils Spread round the valley of its paradise. Look to thyself, priest, conqueror, or prince! Whether thy trade is falsehood, and thy lusts Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor, With wbom thy master was: -or thou delightst In numbering o'er the niyriads of thy slain, All misery weighing nothing in the scale Against thy short-lived fame: or thou dost load With cowardice and crime the groaning land, A pomp-fed king. Look to thy wretched self! Aye, art thou not the veriest slave that c'er Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy days Days of unsatisfying listlessness? Dost thou not cry, ere night's long rack is o'er, When will the morning come? Is not thy youth A vajn and feverish dream of sensualism? Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease? Are not thy views of unregretted death

·IV.
QUEEN MAB.
41
Drear, comfortless, and horrible? Thy mind
Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame,
Incapable of judgment, hope, or love?
And dost thou wish the errors to survive
That bar thee from all sympathies of good,
After the miserable interest
Thou holdst in their protraction ? When the grave
Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself,
Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earth
To twine its roots around thy collined clay,
Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb,
That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die?

·QULEN MAB.
V.
V.
Tiius do the generations of the earth
Go to the grave, and issue from the womb,
Surviving still the imperishable change
That renovates the world; even as the leaves
"l'hich the keen frost-wind of the waning year
llas scattered on the forest soil, and heaped
For many seasons there, though long they choke,
Loading with loathsome rottenncss the land,
All germs of promise. Yet when the tall trees
From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes,
Lie level with the earth to moulder there,
They fertilize the land they long deformed,
Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs
Of youth, integrity, and loveliness,
Like that which gave it life, to spiring mod die.
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all"love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubdnable array.
Twin-sister of religion, selfishness!
Rival in crime and falschood, aping all

·V. QUEEN MAB. 13 The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled, by its deformity, to screen Witb ilimsy veil of justice and of right, Iti unattractive linea meats, that scare All, save the brood of ignorance: at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile; Dead to all love but of its abject:ess, With heart impassive by more noble powers Than unshared pleasure', sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable benne, Which still it longs, yet fears to disenthrall. Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange Of all that human art or nature yield; Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, And natural kindness basteu to supply From the fall fountain of its boundless love, For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now. Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing sbade No solitary virtue dares to spring, But poverty and wealth with eqnal band Scatter their withering curses, and unfold The doors of premature and violent death, To pining famine and full-fed disease, To all that shares the lot of human life, Which poisoned body and soul, scarce drags the chain, That lengthens as it goes and clanks bebind.

·44 QUEEN MAB. V. Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That griuds them to the dust of misery. But in the temple of their bireling hearts Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn All earthly things but virtue. Since tyrants, by the sale of human life, Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame To their wide-wasting and insatiate pride, Success bas sanctioned to a credulous world The ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war. His hosts of bliud and unresisting dupes The despot numbers; from his cabinet These puppets of his schemes he moves at will, Even as the slaves by force or famine driven, Beneath a vulgar master, to perform A task of cold and brutal drudgery;- Hardened to hope, insensible to fear, Scarce living pullies of a dead machine, Mere wheels of work and articles of trade, That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth! The harmony and happiness of man Yields to the wealth of nations; that which lifts ·V. QUEEN MAB. 45 His nature to the heaven of its pride, Is bartered for the poison of his soul; The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes, Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain, Withering all passion but of slavish fear, Extinguishing all free and generous love Of enterprize and daring, even the pulse That fancy kindles in the beating beart To mingle with sensation, it destroys, Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self, 'The groveling hope of interest and gold, Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed Even by bypocrisy. And statesmen boast Of wealth! The wordy eloquence that lives Aftert he ruin of their hearts, can gild The bitter poison of a nation's woe, Can turn the worship of the servile mob To their corrupt and glaring idol fame, From virtue, trampled by its iron tread, Although its dazzling pedestal be raised Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field, With desolated dwellings smoking round. The man of ease, who, by his warm fire-side, To deeds of charitable intercourse And bare fulfilment of the cominon laws Of decency and prejudice, confines The struggling nature of his human heart, Is duped by their cold sophistry; be sheds A passing tear perchance upon the wreck ·46 QULEN MAB. Of eartbly peace, when near his dwelling's door The frightful waves are driven,- when his son Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man, Whose life is misery, and fear, and care; Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil; Who ever lears his famisbed offsprings scream, Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gaze for ever meets, and the proud rich man's eye Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene Of thousands like bimself;—he little heeds The rhetoric of tyranný; his bate ls quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn The vain and bitter mockery of words, Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds, And uurestrained, but by the arm of power, That knows and dreads his enmity. The iron rod of penury still compels Her wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth, And poison, with unprofitable toil, A life too void of solace to confirm The very chains that bind him to his doom. Nature, impartial in munificence, Has gifted man with all-subduing will. Matter, with all its transitory shapes, Lies subjected and plastic at his feet, That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread. How many a rustic Milton has past by, Stifling the speechless loogings of his heart, In unremitting drudgery and care !

·V. QUEEN MAB. 47 How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies, no longer tameless then, To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail! Ilow many a Newton, to whose passive ken Those mighty spheres that gem infinity Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in heaven To light the midnights of his native town! Yet every heart contains perfection's germ: The wisest of the sages of the earth, That ever from the stores of reason drew Science and truth, and virtue's alreadless tone, Were but a weak and inexperienced boy, Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued With pure desire and universal love, Compared to that bigb being, of cloudless brain, Untainted passion, elevated will, Which death (who even would linger long iu awe Within his noble presence, and beneath IIis changeless eyebeam,) might alone subdue. Him, every slave now dragging through the filth Of some corrupted city his sad life, Pining with famine, swoln with luxury, Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense With narrow schemings and unworthy cares, Or madly rushing through all violent crime, To move the deep stagnation of his soul,- Might imitate and equal. But mean lust Has bound its chains so tight around the earth, ·48 QUEEN MAB. That all within it but the virtuous inan Is venal: gold or fame will surely reach The price prefixed by selfishness, to all But him of resolute and unchanging will; Whom, nor the plaudits of a servile crowd, Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury, Can bribe to yield his elevated soul To tyranny or falsehood, though they wield With blood-red hand the sceptre of the world. All things are sold: the very light of heaven Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, The smallest and most despicable things That lurk in the abysses of the deep, All objects of our life, even life itself, And the poor pittance which the laws allow Of liberty, the fellowship of man, Those duties which his heart of human love Should urge him to perform instinctively, Are bought and sold as in a public mart Of undisguising selfishness, that sets On each its price, the stamp-mark of ber reigo. Even love is sold; the solace of all woe }s turned to deadliest agony, old age Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms, And youth's corrupted impulses prepare A life of borror from the blighting bane Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs From unenjoying sengualism, bas filled All human life with bydra-headed woes.

·V. QUEEN MAD. 49 Falsehood demands but gold to pay the pangs Of outraged conscience; for the slavish priest Sets no great value on his hireling faith: A little passing pomp, some servile souls, Whom cowardice itself might safely chain, Or the spare mite of avarice could bribe To deck the triumph of their languid zeal, Can make him minister to tyranny. More daring crime requires a loftier meed: Without a shudder, the slave-soldier kends His arm to murderous deeds, and steels his heart, When the dread eloquence of dying men, Low mingling on the lonely field of fame, Assails that pature, whose applausc he sells For the gross blessings of a patriot mob, For the vile gratitude of heartless kings, And for a cold world's good word,-viler still! There is a nobler glory, which survives Until our being fades, and, solacing All human care, accompanies its change; Deserts not virtue in the dungeon's gloom, And, in the precincts of the palace, guides Its footsteps through that labyrinth of crime; Imbues his lineaments with dauntlessness, Even when, from power's avenging band, he takes Its sweetest, last, and noblest title-death; - The consciousness of good, which neither gold, Nor sordid fame, por hope of heavenly bliss, Can purchase; but a life of resolute good, 4

·50
QUEEN MAB.
Unalterable will, quenchless desire
Of universal happiness, the heart
That beats with it in unison, the brain,
Whose ever wakefut wisdom toils to change
Reason's rich stores for its eternal weal.
This commerce of sincerest virtue needs
No mediative signs of selfishness,
No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,
No balancings of prudence, cold and long;
In just and equal measure all is weighed,
One scale contains the sum of human weal,
And one, the good man's heart.
How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and bardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,--
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they bope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust, and lassitude, pervade
Their valueless aud miserable lives.
But hoary-headed selfishness has felt
Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:
A brighter morn awaits the buman day,
When every transfer of earth's natural gifts

·V.
QUEEN MAB.
61
Shall be a commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease, and woe,
War with its million horrors, and fierce hell
Shall live but in the memory of time
Who, like a penitent libertine, sball start,
Look back, and shudder at bis younger years

·52
QUEEN MAB.
VI.
VI.
ALL touch, all eye, all ear,
The Spirit felt the Fairy's burning speech.
O'er the thin texture of its frame,
The varying periods painted changing glows,
As on a summer even,
When soul-enfolding music floats around,
The stainless mirror of the lake
Re-images the eastern gloom,
Mingling convulsively its purple hues
With sunset's burnished gold.
Then thus the Spirit spoke:
It is a wild and miserable world!
Thorny, and full of care,
Which every fiend can make his prey at will.
O Fairy! in the lapse of years,
Is there no hope in store?
Will
yon
vast suns roll on
Interminably, still illuming
The night of so many wretched souls,
And see no hope for them?
Will not the universal Spirit e'er
Revivify this withered limb of Heaven?

·VI. QUEEN MAB. 53 The Fairy calmly smiled In comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope Suffused the Spirits lineaments. Oh! rest thee tranquil; chase those fearful doubts, Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul, That sees the chains which bind it to its doom. Yes! crime and misery are in yonder earth, Falsehood, mistake, and lust; But the eternal world Contains at once the evil and the cure. Some eminent in virtue sball start up, Even in perversest time: The truths of their pure lips, that never die, Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreath Of ever-living flame, Until the monster sting itself to death. How sweet a scene will earth become! Of purest spirits, a pure dwelling-place, Symphonious with the planetary spheres, When man, with changeless nature coalescing, Will undertake regeneration's work, When its ungenial poles no longer point To the red and baleful sun That faintly twinkles there, Spirit! on yonder earth, Falsehood now triumpbs; deadly power Has fixed its seal upon the lip of truth! Madness and misery are there! The happiest is most wretched ! yet confide, Until pure health-drops from the cup of joy, ·54 QUEEN MAB. VI. Fall like a dew of balm upon the world. Now, to the scene I shew, in silence turn, And read the blood-stained charter of all woe, Which nature soon, with recreating hand, Will blot in mercy from the book of earth. How bold the flight of passion's wandering wing, How swift the step of reason's firmer tread, How calm and sweet the victories of life, How terrorless the triumph of the grave! How powerless were the mightiest monarch's arm, Vain his loud threat, and impotent bis frown! How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar! The weight of his exterminating curse, How light! and bis affected charity, To suit the pressure of the changing times, What palpable deceit!but for thy aid, Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves! Thou taintest all thou lookest upon the stars, Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet, Were gods to the distempered playfulness Of thy untutored infancy: the trees, The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea, All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly, Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moon Her worshipper. Then thou becamest, a boy, More daring in thy frenzies: every shape, Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild, Which, from sensation's relicş, fancy culls;

·VI. QUEEN MIB, 55 The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost, The genii of the elements, the powers That give a shape to nature's varied works, Had life and place in the corrupt belief Of thy blind beart: yet still thy youthful hands Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave Its strength and ardour to thy frenzied bruin; Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride: Their everlasting and unchanging laws Reproached thine iguorance. Awhile thou stoodst Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up The elements of all that thou didst know; The changing seasons, winter's leafless reign, The budding of the heaven-breathing trees, The eternal orbs tbat beautify the night, The sun-rise, and the setting of the moon, Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, And all their causes, to an abstract point, Converging, thou didst bend, and called it-God! The self-sufficing, the omnipotent, The merciful, and the avenging God! Who, prototype of human misrule, sits High in heaven's realm, upon a golden throne, Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work, Hell gapes for ever for the unhappy slaves Of fate, whom he created, in his sport, To triumph in their torments wben they fell! Earth heard the name; earth trembled, as the smoke Of his revenge ascended up to heaven, Blotting the constellations; and the cries ·56 QUEEN MAB. VI. Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths Sworn in his dreadful nanie, rung through the land; Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear, And thou didst laugh to bear the mother's shriek Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel Felt cold in her torn entrails! # Religion! thou wert then in manbood's prime: But age crept on: one God would not suffice For sevile puerility; thou franiedst A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend Thy wickedness had pictured, migbt afford A plea for sating the unnatural thirst For murder, rapine, violence, and crime, That still consumed thy being, even when Thou beardest the step of fate;--that flames might ligh Thy funeral scene, and the shrill horrent shrieks Of parents dying on the pile that burned To light their children to thy paths, the roar Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries Of thine apostles, loud commingling there, Might sate thine hungry ear Even on the bed of death! But now contempt is mccking thy grey hairs; Thou art descending to the darksome grave, Unhonoured and unpitied, but by those Whose pride is passing by like thine, and sheds, .

·VI. QUEEN MAB. 57 Like thine, a glare that fades before the sun Of truth, and shines but in the dreadful night That long has lowered above the ruined world. Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light, Of wbich yon earth is one, is wide diffused A spirit of activity and life, That kuows no term, cessation, or decay; That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, Extinguished in the dampness of the grave, Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe In the dim newness of its being feels The inpulses of sublunary things, Aud all is wonder to unpractised sepse : But, active, sted fast, and eternal, still Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars, Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves, Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease; And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly Rolls round the eternal universe, and shakes Its undecaying battlenient, presides, Apportioning with irresistible law The place each spring of its machine shall fill; So that when waves on waves tumultuous beap Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords, Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner, Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock, All seems unlinked contingency and chance: No atom of this turbulence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, ·58 QUEEN MAB. VI. Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Even the minutest molecule of light, .That in an April sun-beam's fleeting glow Fulfills its destined, though invisible work, The universal Spirit guides; nor less, When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work--glory, does it rule All passions: not a thought, a will, an act, No working of the tyrant's moody mind, Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast Their servitude, to bide the shame they feel, Nor the events enchaining every will, That from the depths of unrecorded time Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee, Soul of the Universe! eternal spring Of life and death, of happiness and woe, Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene That floats before our eyes in wavering ligbt, Which gleams but on the darkuess of our prison, Whose chains and massy walls We feel, but cannot see. Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power, Necessity! thou mother of the world! Unlike the God of human error, thou Requirest no prayers or praises; the caprice Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee Than do the changeful passions of his breast ·VI. QUEEN MAB. 59 To thy unvarying harmony: the slave, Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world, And the good man, who lifts, with virtuous pride, His being, in the sight of happiness, That springs from his own works; the poison-tree, Beneath whose shade all life is withered up, And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords A temple where the vows of happy love Are registered, are equal in thy sight: No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge And favoritism, and worst desire of fanie Thou kuowest not: all that the wide world contains Are but thy passive instruments, and thou Regardst them all with an impartial eye, Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel, Because thou hast not human sense, Because thou art not human mind. 9 Yes! when the sweeping storm of time Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanes And broken altars of the almighty fiend, Whose name usurps thy honours, and the blood Through centuries clotted there, has floated down The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live Unchangeable! A shrine is raised to thee, Which, nor the tempest-breath of time, Nor the interminable flood, Over earth's slight pageant rolling, Availeth to destroy,- The sensitive extension of the world.

·60
QUEEN MAB.
VII.
That wonderous and eternal fane,
Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,
To do the will of strong necessity,
And life, in multitudinous shapes,
Still pressing forward where no term can be,
Like hungry and unresisting flame
Curls round the eternal columns of its strength.

·VII.
QUEEN MAB.
61
VII.
SPIRIT.
I was an infant when my mother went
To see an atheist burned. She took me there:
The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;
The multitude was gazing silently ;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, sbone calmly forth:
The thirsty fire crept round bis manly limbs;
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;
His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob
Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.
Weep not, child! cried my mother, for that man
Has said, There is no God.
FAIRY.
There is no God!
Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed :
Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race,
His ceaseless generations tell their tale;
Let every part depending on the chain
That links it to the whole, point to the band
That grasps its term ! let every seed that falls

·62 QUEEN MAB. VII. In silent eloquence unfold its store Of argument: infinity within, Infinity without, belie creation; The exterminable spirit it contains Is nature's only God; but human pride Is skilful to invent most serious names To bide its ignorance. The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers, Whose names, and attributes, and passions change, tera, Buddh, Foh, Jebovab, God, or Lord, Even with the human dupes who build his shrines, Still serving o'er the war-polluted world For desolation's watch-word; whether hosts Stain his death-blusbing chariot-wheels, as on Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans; Or countless partners of bis powers divide His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness, Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven honour of his name; or, last and worst, Karth groans beneath religion's iron age, priests dare babble of a God of peace, en whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ un truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter-house!

·VII. QUEEN MAB. 63 O Spirit! through the sense By which thy inner nature was apprised Of outward shews, vague dreams have rolled, And varied reminiscences have waked Tablets that never fade; All things have been imprinted there, Tbe stars, the sea, the earth, the sky, Even the unshapeliest lineaments Of wild and fleeting visions Have left a record there To testify of earth. These are my empire, for to me is given The wonders of the human world to keep, And fancy's thin creations to endow With manner, being, and reality; Therefore a wondrous phantom, from the dreams Of human errors dease and purblind faith, I will evoke, to meet thy questioning. Ahasuerus, rise! A strange and woe-worn wight Arose beside the battlement, And stood unmoving there. His inessential figure cast no shade Upon the golden floor; His port and mien bore mark of many years, And chronicles of untold ancientness Were legible within his beamless eye: Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth; Fresbness and vigour knit his manly frame;

·64
QUEEN MAB.
VII.
The wisdom of old age was mingled there
With youth's primæval dauntlessness ;
And inexpressible woe,
Chastened by fearless resignation, gave
An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.
SPIRIT.
Is there a God?
AHASUERUS.
Is there a God ?-aye, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice
Was beard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound;
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power. None but slaves
Survived, --cold-blooded slaves, who did the work
Of tyrannons omnipotence; whose souls
No honest indignation ever urged
To elevated daring, to one deed
Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.
These slaves built temples for the ompipotent,
Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked
With human blood, and hideous pæans rung
Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard
His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts
Had raised him to his eminence in power,

·VII. QUEEN MAB. 65 Accomplice of omnipotence in crime, And confidant of the all-knowing one. These were Jehovah's words. 3 From an eternity of idleness I, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made earth From nothing; rested, and created man: I placed him in a paradise, and there Planted the tree of evil, so that he Might'eat and perish, and my soul procure Wherewith to sate its malice, and to turn, Even like a heartless conqueror of the earih, All misery to my fame. The race of men Chosen to my honour, with impunity May sate the lusts I planted in their heart, Here I command thee hence to lead them on, Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troops Wade on the promised soil through woman's blood, And make my name be dreaded through the laud. Yet ever burning flame and ceaseless woe Shall be the doom of their eternal souls, With every soul on this ungrateful earth, Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong,-even all Shall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge (Which you, call justice) of their God. to men, The murderer's brow Quivered with horror. God omnipotent, Is there no mercy ? must our punishment 5 ·66 QUEEN MAB. VII. Be endless ? will long ages roll away, And see no term? Oh! wherefore bast thou made In mockery and wrath this evil earth? Mercy becomes the powerful-be but just: O God! repent and save. One way remains: I will beget a son, and he shall bear The sins of all the world; he shall arise In an unnoticed corner of the earth, And there shall die upon a cross, and purge The universal crime; so that the few On whom my grace descends, those who are marked As vessels to the honour of their God, May credit this strange sacrifice, and save Their souls alive: millions shall live and die, Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name, But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave. Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale, Such as the nurses frighten babes witbal: These, in a gulph of anguish and of flame, Shall curse their reprobation endlessly, Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, Even on their beds of torment, where they howl, My honour, and the justice of their doom. What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts Of purity, with radiant genius bright, Or lit with human reason's earthly ray? Many are called, but few will I elect. Do thou my bidding, Moses !

·VII. QUEEN MAB. 67 Even the murderer's cheek Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips Scarce faintly uttered-O almighty one, I tremble and obey! O Spirit! centuries have set their seal On this beart of many wounds, and loaded brain, Since the Incarnate came: humbly he came, Veiling bis horrible Godhead in the shape Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of bis native town, Even as a parish demagogue. He led The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace, In semblance; but he lit within their souls The quenchless flames of zeal, and blest the sword He brought on earth to satiate with the blood Of truth and freedom bis malignant soul. At length his mortal frame was led to death. I stood beside bim: on the torturing cross No pain assailed bis unterrestrial sense ; Avd yet he groaned. Indiguantly, I summed The massacres and miseries which his name Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried, Go! go! in mockery. A smile of godlike malice re-illumined His fading lineaments. I go, he cried, But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth Eternally. -The dampness of the grave Batbed my imperishable front. I fell, And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil.

·68 QUEEN MAB. VII. When I awoke hell burned within my brain, Which staggered on its seat; for all around The mouldering relics of my kindred lay, Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them, And in their various attitudes of death My murdered children's mule and eyeless sculls Glared ghastily upon me. But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaveu. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lovely and unending pilgrimage, Resolved to wage unweariable war With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl Defiance at his impotence to harm Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand That barred my passage to the peaceful grave Has crushed the earth to misery, and given Its empire to the chosen of his slaves. These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn Of weak, unstable, and precarious power; Then preaching peace, as now they practise war, :So, when they turned but from the massacre Of unoffending infidels, to quench Their thirst for ruin in the very blood That flowed in their own veins, and pityless zeal Froze every human feeling, as the wife Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel, ·VII. QUEEN AAB. 69 Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love; And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war, Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught waged, Drunk from the wine-press of the Almighty's wrath ; Whilst the red cross in mockery of peace, Pointed to victory! When the fray was done, No remnant of the exterminated faith Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh, With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere, That rotted on the half-extinguished pile. Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe The sword of his revenge, when grace descended, Confirming all unnatural impulses, To sanclify their desolating deeds; And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross O'er the unhappy earth: then shone the Sun On showers of gore from the upflashing steel Of safe assassination, and all crime Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord, And blood-red rainbows canopied the land. Spirit! no year of my eventful being Has passed unstained by crime and misery, Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and whilst one band was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace; and that they now ·70 QUEEN MAB. VII. Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise; Reason may claim our gratitude, who now Establishing the imperishable throne Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain The unprevailing malice of my foe, Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave, Adds impotent eternities to pain, Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast To see the smiles of peace around them play, To frustrate, or to sanctify their doom. Thus have I stood,-through a wild waste of years Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined, Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse With stubborn and unalterable will, Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand A monument of fadeless ruin there; Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves The midnight conflict of the wintry storm, As in the sun-light's calm it spreads Its worn and withered arms on high To meet the quiet of a summer's noon. The Fairy waved her wand: Ahasuerus fled Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,

·VII
QUEEN MAB,
71
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,
Flee from the morning beam:
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought.

·72
QUEEN MAB.
VIII.
VIII.
The present and the past thou hast beheld :
It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn
Tbc secrets of the future.-Time!
Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud. Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny!
Joy to the Spirit came.
Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,
Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:
Earth was no longer hell;
Love, freedom, health, bad given
Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,
And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres :
Then dulcet music swelled
Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;
It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,
Catching new life from transitory death,
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,

·VIII. QUEEN MAB. 73 That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea And dies on the creation of its breath, And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits: Was the pure stream of feeling That spring from these sweet notes, And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed. Joy to the Spirit came, - Such joy as when a lover sees The chosen of bis soul in bappiness, And witnesses her peace Wbose woe to him were bitterer than death, Sees her unfaded cheek Glow mantling in first luxury of health, Thrills with her lovely eyes, Which like two stars amid the heaving main Sparkle through liquid bliss. Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen: I will not call the ghost of ages goue To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore; The present now is past, And those events that desolate the earth Have faded from the memory of Time, Who dares not give reality to that Whose being I annul. To me is given The wonders of the human world to keep, Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity Exposes now its treasure; let the sight Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.

·74 QUEEN MAB. VIII. O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal Where virtue fixes universal peace, And midst the ebb and flow of human things, Shew somewhat stable, somewbat certain still, A lighthouse o'er the wild of dreary waves. The habitable earth is full of bliss ; Those wastes of frozen billows that were burled By everlasting snow-storms round 'poles, Where matter dared not vegetate or live, But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed; And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles Ruffle the placid ocean-deep that rolls Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand, Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves And melodize with man's blest nature tbere. Those deserts of immeasurable sand, Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowed A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring, Where the sbrill chirp of the green lizard's love Broke on the sultry silentoess alone, Now teem with countless rills and shady woods, Corn-fields, and pastures, and white cottages; And where the startled wilderness beheld A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood, A tygress sating with the flesh of lambs, The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs, Whilst shouts and bowlings through the desert rang, ·VIII. QUEEN MAB, 75 Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawı, Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles To see a babe before his mother's door, Sharing his morning's meal With the green and golden basilisk That comes to lick his feet. Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen above the illimitable plain, Morning on night, and night on morning rise, Wbilst still no land to grect the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea, Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves So long have mingled with the gusty wind In melancholy loneliness, and swept The desert of those ocean solitudes, But vocal to the sea-bird's barrowing shriek, The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm, Now to the sweet and many mipgling sounds Of kindliest human impulses respond. Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem, With lightsome clouds and shining seas between, And fertile vallies resonant with bliss, Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave, Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore, To meet the kisses of the flowrets there. All things are recreated, and the flame Of consentaneous love inspires all life: The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck To myriads, who still grow beneath her care, ·76 QU'EEN MAB. VIIT. Rewarding her with their pure perfectness: The balıny breathings of the wind in bale Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad: Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere, Glows iu the fruits, and mantles on the stream: No storm deforms the beaming brow of heaven, Nor scatters in the freshness of its pride The foliage of the ever-verdant trees; But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair, And autumn proudly bears her matron grace, Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring, Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit Reflects its tint and blushes into love. The lion now forgets to thirst for bloon: There might you see him sporting in the sun Beside the dreadless kid ; his claws are sheathed, His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made His nature as the nature of a lamb. Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting bane Poisons no more the pleasure it beslows: All bitterness is past; the cup of joy Uomingled mantles to the goblet's brim, And courts the thirsty lips it fled before. But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know More misery, and dream more joy than-all; Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast To mingle with a loftier instinct there, Lending their power to pleasure and to pain, Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;

·VIII. QUEEN MAB. 77 Who stands amid the ever-varying world, The burtben or the glory of the earth; He chief perceives the change, his being notes The gradual renovation, and defines Each movement of its progress on his mind. Man, where the gloom of the long polar night Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; His chilled and narrow energies, his heart, Insensible to courage, truth, or love, His stunted stature and imbecile frame, Marked him for some abortion of the earth, Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around, Whose habits and enjoyments were his own: His life a feverish dream of staguant woe, Whose meagre wants but scantily fulfilled, Apprised him ever of the joyless length Which his short being's wretchedaess had reached; His death a pang, which famine, cold, and toil Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought: All was inflicted here that earth's revenge Could wreak on the infringers of her law; One curse alone was spared—the name of God. Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere ·78 QULEN MAP, "IN. Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fcd Unnatural yegetation, where the land 'l'evmed with all earthquake, tempest, end Vizcasc, Waw man a robier being ; slavery Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust; Or he was bartered for the fame of power, Which all internal impulses destroying, Makes human will an article of trade; Orle was changed with Christians for their gold, And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound Of the fiesh-mangling scourge, he does the work Of all-polluting luxury and wealth, Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads The long-protracted fulness of their woe; Or he was led to legal butchery, To turn to worms beneath that burning sun, Where kings first leagucd against the rights of men, And priests first traded wiih the name of God. Even wherc the milder zone afforded man A seening shelter, yet contagion there, Bligbting his being with unnumbered ills, Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late Availed to arrest its progress, or create That peace wbich first in bloodless victory waved Her snowy standard o'er this fe oured c'ime: There man was long the train-carer of claves, The mimic of surrounding misery, The jackall of ambition's lion --62, The bloodhound of religioz'a 2 gry zeal.

·VIII. QUEEN MAB. 79 Here now the human being stands adorning This loveliest earth, with taintless body and mind; Blest from his birth with all bland imp'ilses, Which gently in his poble bosom wake All kindly passions and all pure desires. Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing, Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness, gift With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks The unprevailing hoariness of age, And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene Swift as an unremembered vision, stands Immortal upon earth: no longer now He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, And horribly devours his mangled flesh, Which still avenging Dature's broken law, Kindled all putrid humours in his frame, All evil passions, and all vain belief, Hatred, despair, and loathing in bis mind, The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. No longer now the winged habitants, That in the woods their sweet lives sing away, Flee from the form of man; but gather round, And prune their sunny feathers ou the hands Which little children stretch in friendly sport Towards these dreadless partners of their play. All things are void of terror: man bas lost His terrible prerogative, and stands An equal amidst equals: happiness And science dawn though late upon the earth ;

·80
QUEEN MAB.
VIII.
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reasou and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend
Their all-subduing energies, and wield
The sceptre of a vast dominion there;
Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends
Its force to the omnipotence of mind,
Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth
To decorate its paradise of peace.

·IX.
QUEEN AAB.
81
IX.
O HAPPY Earth! reality of Heaven!
To which those restless souls that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe, aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope!
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!
Whose rays diffused throughout all space and time,
Verge to one point and blend for ever there:
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling place!
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance, dare not come:
O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!
Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness
Haunting the human beart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss
Where friends and lovers meet to part no more.
Thou art the end of all desire and will,
The product of all action: and the souls
That by the paths of an aspiring change :
Have reached thy baven.of perpetual peace,
There rest from the eternity of toil
That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.
6

·82 QUEEN AAB. IX. Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear; That boary giant, who, in lonely pride, So long had ruled the world, that nations fell Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids, That for millenniums had withstood the tide of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand Across that desert where their stones survived The name of him whose pride had heaped them there. Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp, Was but the mushroom of a summer day, That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust: Time was the king of earth: all things gave way Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will, The sacred sympathies of soul and sense, That mocked his fury and prepared his fall. Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love; Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene, Till from its native heaven they rolled away: First, crime, triumphant o'er all hope, careered Unblushing, undisguising, bold, and strong; Whilst falsehood, tricked in virtue's attributes, Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe, Till done by her own venomous sting to death, Sbe left the moral world without a law, No longer fettering passion's fearless wing, Nor searing reason with the brand of God. Then steadily the bappy ferment worked; Reason was free; and wild though passion went Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads, Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers, ·IX. QUEEN MIB. 83 Yet like the bee returning to her queen, She bound the sweetest on her sister's brow, Who, meek and sober, kissed the sportive child, No longer trembling at the broken rod. Mild was the slow necessity of death: The tranquil Spirit failed beneath its grasp, Without a groan, almost without a fear, Calm as a voyager to some distant land, And full of wonder, full of hope as he. The deadly germs of langnor and disease Died in the human frame, and purity Blest with all gifts her earthly worshippers. How vigorous then the athletic form of age! How clear its open and unwrinkled brow! Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, nor care, Had stamped the seal of grey deformity On all the mingling lineaments of time. How lovely the intrepid front of youth! Which meek-eyed courage decked with freshest grace; Courage of soul, that dreaded nct a name, And elevated will, that journeyed on Through life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness, With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand. Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom's self, And rivets with sensation's softest tie The kindred sympathies of human souls, Needed no fetters of tyrannic law: 'Those delicate and timid impulses ·84 QUEEN MAB. IX. In nature's primal modesty arose, And with undoubting confidence disclosed The growing longings of its dawning love, Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity, That virtue of the cheaply virtuous, Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost. No longer prostitution's venomed bane Poisoned the springs of happiness and life; Woman and man, in confidence and love, Equal, and free, and pure, together trod The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet. Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride The palace of the monarch-slave bad mocked Famine's faint groan, and penury's silent tear, A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw Year after year their stones upon the field, Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower Usurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shook In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind's ear. Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles The melangholy winds a death-dirge sung: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, So sumptuous, yet so perishing witbal! Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.

·IX. QUEEN MAB. 85 A thousaod mourners deck the pomp of death To-day, the breathing marble glows above To decorate its memory, and tongues Are busy of its life: to-morrow worms In silence and in darkness seize their prey. Within the massy prison's mouldering courts, Fearless and free the ruddy children played, Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows With the green ivy and the red wall-flower, That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom; The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron, There rusted amid heaps of broken stone That mingled slowly with their native earth: There the broad beam of day, which feebly once Lighted the cheek of lean captivity With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone On the pure smiles of infant playfulness : No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair Pealed througb the echoing vaults, but soothing notes Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds And merriment were resonant around. These ruins soon left not a wreck behind : Their elements, wide scattered o'er the globe, To bappier sbapes were moulded, and became Ministrant to all blissful impulses : Thus human things were perfected, and earth, Even as a child beneath its mother's love, Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew Fairer and nobler with each passing year.

·86 QUEEN MAB. IX. Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene Closes in stedfast darkness, and the past Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done: Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own, With all the fear and all the hope they bring. My spells are past: the present now recurs. Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains Yei unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand. Yet, bumau Spirit, bravely hold thy course, Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue The gradual paths of an aspiring change: For birth, and life, and death, and that strange state Before the naked soul bas found its home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge The restless wheels of being on their way, Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life, Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal: For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense Of outward shews, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe; Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beamping skies And happy regions of eternal bope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakeniug breath will woo the earth, ·IX. QUEEN MAB, 87 To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile. Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand, So welcome when the tyrant is awake, So welcome when the bigot's bell-torcb burns; 'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, The transient gulph-dream of a startling sleep. Death is no foe to virtue: Earth has seen Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom, Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there, And presaging the truth of visioned bliss. Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene Of linked and gradyal being has confirmed ? Whose stingings bade thy heart louk further still, When to the moonlight walk by Henry led, Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death? And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast, Listening supinely to a bigot's creed, Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod, Whose iron thongs are red with human gore? Never: but bravely bearing on, thy will, Is destined an eternal war to wage With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot The germs of misery from the human heart. Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe The thorny pillow of unbappy crime, Whose impotence an easy pardon gains, Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease: Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy ·88 QUEEN MAB. IX. Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will, When fenced by power and master of the world. Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind, Free from heart-withering custom's cold controul, Of passion lofty, pure and upsubdued. Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee, And therefore art thou worthy of the boon Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod, And many days of beaming hope shall bless Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love. Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch Light, life, and rapture from thy smile. The Fairy waves her wand of charm. Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car, That rolled beside the battlement, Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness. Again the euchanted steeds were yoked, Again the burning wheels inflame The steep descent of beaven's untrodden way. Fast and far the chariot flew : The vast and fiery globes that rolled Around the Fairy's palace-gate Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs That there attendant on the solar power With borrowed light pursued their parrower way. Earth floated then below: The chariot paused a moment there; 4

·IX.
QUEEN MAB.
89
The Spirit then descended :
The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,
Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done,
Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven.
+
The Body and the Soul united then,
A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame:
Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;
Moveless a wbile the dark blue orbs remained :
She looked around in wonder and beheld
Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casenient sbone.

·No text on this page.

·NOTES.

·It will be seen by the author of QUEEN MAB, and those few gentlemen who have a copy of the former edition, that I have been studious in adhering to the original copy The Dotes in French, Latin, and Greek are printed verbatim, as the classical scholar would prefer them in the language they were originally written in, and the general reader in translation. W. CLARK.

·NOTES. I. Page 12. The sun's unclouded orb Rolled through the black concavc. Beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted : observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8' 7" in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles. Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars, when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun froin the earth.

·94 NOTES. I. PAGE 12. Whilst round the chariut's way Innumerable systemis rolled. The plurality of worlds, the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur, is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine, begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonyme of itself. AN that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcileable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him. The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Syrius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles from the earth. That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven, is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millious of suns are ranged around us, all * See Nicholson's Encyclopædia, art. Light.

·NOTES. 95 attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity. ly. PAGE 38. These are the hired bravoes who dcfend The tyrant's throne. To employ murder as a means of justice, is an idea which a man of an enlightened mind will not dwell upon with pleasure. To march forth in rank and file, with all the pomp of streamers and trumpets, for the purpose of shooting at our fellow-men as a mark; to inflict upon them all the variety of wound and anguisb; to leave them weltering in their blood; to wander over the field of desolation, and count the number of the dying and the dead,-are employments which in thesis we may maintain to be necessary, but which no good man will contemplate with gratulation and delight. A battle we suppose is won :thus truth is established;- thus the cause of justice is confirmed! It surely requires no commou sagacity to discern the connection between this immense heap of calamities, and the assertion of truth, or the maintenance of justice. Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed, are, for the most part, persons who have been trepapped into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never of ·96 NOTES. 2 feuded him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableriess of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being. To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet bis profession inevitably teaches bim something of dogmatism, swaggering, and self-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strutirand-swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know caonot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exbibitor.—Godwin's Enquirer, Essay V. I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood, tbat I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportịnity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion. FALSEHOOD AND VICE. A DIALOGUE. Whilst monarcbs laughed upon their thrones To hear a famisbed neops groans, And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe That makes its eyes and veins o'erflow,

·NOTES.
97
the heaps
Those thrones, high built upon
of bones where frenzied famine slecps.
Where slavery wields her scourge of iron,
Red with mankind's uubeeded gore,
And war's mad fiends the scene environ,
Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar,
There Vice and Falsehood took their stand,
High raised above the unhappy land.
14
FALSEHOOD.
Brother! arise from the daintyttare,
Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow;
A finer feast for thine hungry ear
Is the news that I bring of human woe.
VICE,
And, secret one, what hast thou done,
To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?
I, whose career, through the blasted year,
Has been tracked by despair and agony.
FALSEħood,
What have I done! I have torn the robe
From baby truth's unsheltered form,
And round the desolated globe
Borne safely the bewildering charm:
My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor
Have bound the fearless innocent,
7

·98
NOTES,
And streams of fertilizing gore
Flow from her bosom's hideous rent,
Which this unfailing dagger gave.....
I dread that blood no more-this day
Is ours, though her eternal çay
Must shine upon our grave.
Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given
To thee the robe I stole from heaven,
Thy shape of ugliness and fear
Had never gained admission here.
VICE.
And know, that bad I disdained to toil,
But sate in my loathsome cave the while,
And ne'er to these hateful sons of heaven,
GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER given:
Hadst thou with all thiñe art essayed
One of thy games then to have played,
With all thine overweening boast,
Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost!
Yet wherefore this dispute? --we tend,
Fraternal, to one common end;
In this cold grave beneath my feet,
Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours meet.
FALSEHOOD.
I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth:
She smotbered Reason's babes in their birth;
But dreaded their mother's eye severe,
So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear,

·NOTES, 99 And loosed her bloodhounds from the den..... They started from dreams of slaughtered men, And, by the light of her poison eye, Did her work o'er the wide earth frightfully: The dreadful stench of her torches flare, Fed with human fat, polluted the air : The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries Of the many-mingling miseries, As on she trod, ascended high And trumpeted my victory!- Brother, tell what thou hast done. VICE. I have extinguished the noon-day sun, In the carnage-smoke of battles won: Famine, murder, hell, and power, Were glutted in that glorious hour Which searchless fate had stamped for me With the seal of her security..... For the bloated wretch on yonder throne Commanded the bloody fray to rise: Like me he joyed at the stifled moan Wrung from a nation's miseries ; While the snakes, whose slime even him defiled, In ecstasies of malice smiled: They thought 'twas theirs, but mine the deed! Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed- Ten thousand victims madly bleed. They dream that tyrants goad them there With poisonous war to taint the air :

·100 NOTES. These tyrants, on their beds of thorn, Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame, And with their gains to lift my nanie. Restless they plan from night to morn: I—I do all; without my aid Thy daughter, that relentless maid, Could never o'er a death-bed urge The fury of her venomed scourge. FALSEHOOD. Brother, well : the world is ours; And whether thou or I have won, The pestilence expectant lowers On all beneath yon blasted sun, Our joys, our toils, our honours meet In the milk-white and wormy winding-sheet: A short-lived hope, unceasing care, Some heartless scraps of godly prayer, A moody curse, and a frenzied sleep Ere gapes the graves unclosing deep, A tyrant's dream, a coward's start, The ice that clings to a priestly heart, A judge's frown, a courtier's smile, Make the great whole for which we toil; And, brother, whether thou or I Have done the work of misery, It little boots: thy toil and pain, Without my aid were more than vain ; And but for thee I ne'er bad sate The guardian of heaven's palace gate.

·NOTES. 101 V. PAGE 42. 1 * Thus do the generations of the earth Go to the grave, and issue from the womb. One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again, according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place wbence the rivers come, thither shall they return again. Ecclesiastes, chap. i. V. PAGE 42. Even as the leaves Which the keen frosi wind of the waning year Ilas scattered on the forest soil. Οϊη περ φύλλων γενε), τοιήδε και ανδρών. Φύλλα τα μέν τ' άνεμος χαμάδες χέει, άλλα δε θύλη Τηλεθόωσα φύει, έαρος δ'επιγίγνεται ώρη: “Ως ανδρών γενεή, η μεν φύει ηδ' απολήγει. IAIAA. Z'. 1, 146. a a Like Icaves on trees the race of man is found, Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; Another race the following spring supplies; They fall successive, and successive rise : So generations in their course decay; So flourish these, when those are past away. Pope's Homer.

·102 NOTES, . V. PAGE 44. The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings. Suave mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis E terrâ magnum alterius spectare laborem; Non quia vexari quemquam 'st jucunda voluptas, Sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave 'st. Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri, Per campos instructa, tua sine parte pericli; Sed nil dulcius est bene quam munita tenere Edita doctrina sapieptum templa serena; Despicere unde queas alios, passim que videre Errare atque viam palanteis quærere vitæ ; Certare ingenio; contendere nobilitate; Nocteis atque dies niti præstante labore Ad summas emergere opes, rerum que potiri. O miseras hominum menteis! O pectora cæcaa ! Luc. lib. ii. # When the wide ocean*maddening whirlwinds swecp, And heave the billows of the boiling deep, Pleased wc from land the reeling bark survey, And rolling mountains of the watery way. Not that we joy another's woes to sec, But to reflect that we ourselves are free. Su; the dread battle ranged in distant fields, Oursclves secure, a secret plcasure yields. But what more charming than to gain the height Of true philosophy? What pure delight From Wisdom's citadel to view below, Deluded mortals, as they wandering go In quest of happiness ! alı, blindly weak! For fame, for vain nobility they seek ;

·NOTES, 103 V. PAGE 45. And statesmen boast Of wcalth ! T There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold, and the vallies of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer;: no one comfort would be added to the buman race. In consequence of our consideration for the precious metals, one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expence of the necessaries of his neighbour; system admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crime, which never fail to characterise the two extremes of opulence and penury. A speculator takes pride to himself as the promoter of his country's prosperity, who employs a number of bands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use, or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation. The nobleman, who employs the peasants of his neighbourhood in building his palaces, until “jam pauca aratro jugera, regiæ moles relinquunt," flatters himself that he has gained the title a patriot by yielding to the impulses of vanity. THE shew and pomp of courts adduces the same apology for Labour for heapy treasures, night and day, And pant for power and magisterial sway Oh, wretched mortals ! souls devoid of light, Lost in the shades of intellectual night! Dy. Busby's Lucretius. a These piles of royal structure, will os osoon leave but few acres for the plough.

·104 NOTES. its continuance; and many a fête has been given, many a woman has eclipsed her beauty by her dress, to benefit the labouring poor and to encourage trade. Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates, whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society? The poor are set to labour,--for what? Not the food for which they famish: not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels: not those comfors of civilization without which civilizcd man is far more miserable than the meanest savage; oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before bim:--no; for the pride of power, for the miserable (solation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society: No greater evidence is afforded of the wide extended and radical mistakes of civilized man than this fact: those arts which are essential to bis very being are held in the greatest contempt; employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulnessä: the jeweller, the toy man, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to subsist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing awertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind. I will not insult cominon sense by insisting on the doctrine of 'he natural equality of man. The question a See Rousscau, “ De l'Inegalité parmi les Honnes," note 7.

·NOTES, 105 is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability: so far as it is practicable, it is desirable. That state of human society which approaches nearer to an equal partition of its benefits and evils should, cæteris paribus“, be preferred: but so long as we conceive that a wanton expenditure of human labour, not for the necessities, not even for the luxuries of the mass of society, but for the egotism and ostentation of a few of its members, is defensible on the ground of public justice, so long we neglect to approximate to the re. demption of the human race. Labour is required for physical, and leisure for moral improvement: from the former of these advantages the rich, and from the latter the poor, by the inevitable condition of their respective situations, are precluded. A state which should combine the advantages of both, would be subjected to the evils of neither. He that is deficient in firm health, or vigorous intellect, is but half a man: hence it follows, that, to subject the labouring classes to unuecessary labour, is wantonly depriving them of any opportunities of intellectual improvement; and that the rich are heaping up for their own mischief the disease, lassitude and ennui by which their existence is rendered an intolerable burthen. English reformers exclaim against sinecures-but the true pension-list is the rent-roll of the landed proprietors: wealth is a power usurped by the few, to compel the many to labour for their benefit. The laws which support this system derive their force from the * Making allowances on both sides.

·106 NOTES. ignorance and credulity of its victims: they are the result of a couspiracy of the few against the many, who are themselves obliged to purchase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort. The commodities that substantially contribute to the subsistence of the human species form a very short catalogue : they demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labour necessarily required to produce them were equitably divided among the poor, and, still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample. There was a time when this leisure would have been of small comparative value: it is to be hoped that the time will come, when it will be applied to the most importaut purposes. Those hours which are not required for the production of the necessaries of life, may be devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the eularging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sources of enjoyment. It was perhaps necessary that a period of monopoly and oppression should subsist, before a period of cultivated equality could subsist. Savages perhaps would never have been excited to the discovery of truth and the invention of art, but by the narrow motives which such a period affords. But, surely, after the savage ·NOTES. 107 state bas ceased, and men have set out in the glorious career of discovery and invention, monopoly and oppression cannot be necessary to prevent them from returning to a state of barbarism.-Godwin's Enquirer, Essay II. See also Pol. Jus., Book VIII. chap. 11. It is a calculation of this admirable autbor, that all the conveniences of civilized life might be produced, if society would divide the labour equally among its members, by each individual being employed in labour two bours during the day. V. PAGE 46. Or religion Drives his wife raving mad, I am acquainted with a lady of considerable accomplishments, and the mother of a numerous family, whom the Christian religion has goaded to incurable insanity. A parallel case is, I believe, within the experience of every physician. Nam jam sæpe homines patriam, carosque parentes Prodiderunt, vitare Acherusia templa petentesa. Lucretius. a For some, the approach of Death and Hell to stay, Their parents, friends, and country, will betray. Dr, Busby's Lucretius.

·108 NOTES. V. Page 48. Even love is sold. Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty : it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve. How long then ought the sexual connection to last ? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration ? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, ·NOTES. 109 more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of ima. gination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensi-, ble merits of the object. The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences; and that the fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God bas been discarded. I bave heard, indeed, an ignorant collegian adduce, in favour of Christianity, its hostility to every worldly feeling a ! But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of & The first Christian emperor made a law by which seduction was punished with death; if the female pleaded her own consent, shc also was punished with death; if the parents endeavoured to screen the criminals, they were banished, and their estates were confiscated; the slaves who might be accessary were burned alive, or forced to swallow melted lead. very offspring of an illegal love were involved in the consequences of the sentence.-Gibbon's Decline and Fall, &c. vol, ji. page 210. See also, for the hatred of the primitive Christians to love, and even marriage, The page 269.

·110 NOTES. vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry. The language of the votarist is this: The woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I vow profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one, and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to adhere to them.-Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief? The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than maķe hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it in possible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feeliugs of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which ouly death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood. Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of ·NOTES. 111 misery: they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is for ever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable, and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal. If this counection were put on a rational basis, each would be assured that habitual ill temper would terminate in separation, and would check this vicious and dangerous propensity. Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder; and the punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape reproach, is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the prostitute is irrecoverably doomed. His a woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature ;-society declares war against her, pityless and eternal war: she must be the tame slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She lives a life of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her froin all return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet she is in fault, she is the criminal, ·112 NOTES. she the froward and untameable child-and society, forsooth, the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her undefiled bosom! Society avenges herself on the criminals of her own creation; she is employed in anatbematizing the vice to-day, which yesterday she was the most zealous to teach. Thus is formed one-tenth of the population of London, meanwhile the evil is twofold. Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and deroted- Their body and mind alike.crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiotcy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations suffer for the bigotted morality of their forefathers. Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. I conceive that, from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary; it appears, Dess.

·NOTES. 113 from the relation of parent to child, that this 'union is generally of long duration, and marked above al others with generosity and self-devotion. But this i a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the abolition of marriage, will be natural and right, because choice and change will be exempted from restraint. In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the genius of human happjuess must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God, ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look in the mirror of nature ! VI. PAGE 53. To the red and balcful sun That faintly twinkles there, The north polar star, to which the axis of the earth, in its present state of obliquity, points. It is exceedingly probable, from many considerations, that this obliquity will gradually diminish, until the equator coincides with the ecliptic: the nights and days will then become equal on the earth throughout the year, and probably the seasons also. There There is no great extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be as rapid as the progress of intellect; or that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement 8 ·114 NOTES. of the human species. It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man. Astronomy teaches us that the earth is now in its progress, and that the poles are every year becoming more and more perpendicular to the ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded by the history of mythology, and geological researches, that some event of this nature has taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this progress is not merely an oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers*. Bones of animals peculiar to the torrid zone have been found in the north of Siberia, and on the banks of the river Ohio. Plants have been found in the fossil state in the interior of Germany, which demand the present climate of Hindostan for their productions. The researches of M. Bailly establish the existence of a people who inbabit a tract of land in Tartary, 49° north latitude, of greater antiquity than either the Indians, the Chinese, or the Chaldeans, from whom these nations derived their sciences and theology. We find, from the testimony of ancient writers, that Britain, Germany, and France, were much colder than at present, and that their great rivers were annually frozen over. Astronomy teaches us also, that since this period ibe obliquity of the earth's position has been considerably diminished. • Laplace, Systême du Monde. + Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, vol. ii. p 406. Lettres sur les Sciences, a Voltaire. Bailly.

·NOTES, 115 VI. Page 57. No atom of this turbolence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Deux exemples serviront à nous rendre plus sensible le principe qui vient d'être pose; nous emprunterons l'une du physique et l'autre du moral. Dans un tourbillon de poussière qu'éleve un vent impetueux, quelque confus qu'il paroisse à nos yeux; dans la plus affreuse tempête excité par des vents opposes qui soulèvent les flots, il n'y a pas une seule molècule de poussière ou d'eau qui soit placé au hazard, qui n'ait sa cause suffisante pour occuper le lieu og elle se trouve, et qui n'agisse rigoureussement de la manière dont elle doit agir. Une géomètre qui connoîtroit exactement les différentes forces qui agissent dans ces deux cas, et les propriétés des molécules qui sont mues, demontreroit que d'après des causes donnés, chaque molécule agit précisément comme elle doit agir, et ne peut agir autrement qu'elle ne fait. Dans les convulsions terribles qui agitent quelquefois les sociétés politiques, et qui produisent souvent le renversement d'un empire, il n'y a pas une seule action, une seule parole, une seule pensée, une seule volonté, une seule passion dans les agens qui concourent à la révolution comme destructeurs ou comme victimes, qui ne soit nécessaire, qui n'agisse comme elle doit agir, qui n'opère infalliblement les effets qu'elle doit opérer, suivant la place qu’occupent ces agens dans ce tourbillon moral. Cela paroîtroit évident pour une ·116 NOTES. intelligence qui sera en état de saisir et d'apprécier toutes les actions et re-actions des esprits et des corps de ceux qui contribuent à cette révolution a. Systeme de la Nature, vol. i. p. 44. VI. PAGE 58. Necessity! thou mother of the world! He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity, means that, contemplating the events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects, no one of wbich could occupy any other place than it a Two instances will serve to render more sensible to us the principle here laid down; we will borrow one from natural the other from moral philosophy. In a whirlwind of dust raised by an impetuous wind, however confused it may appear to our eyes; in the most dreadful tempest excited by opposing winds, which convulse the waves, there is not a single particle of dust or of water that is placed by chance that has not its sufficient cause for occupying the situation in which it is, and which does not rigororously act in the mode it should act. A geometrician who knew equally the different powers which operate in both cases, and the properties of the particles which are propelled, would shew that according to the given causes, cach particle acts precisely as it should act, and cannot act otherwise than it does. In thuse terrible convulsions which sometimes agitate political societies, and which frequently bring on the overthrow of an empire, there is not a single action, a single word, a single thought, a single volition, a single passion in the agents, which co in the revolution as destroyers, or as victimns, which is not necessary, which does not act as it should act, which does not infallibly produce the effects which it should produce, according to the place occupied by these agents in the moral whirlwind. This would appear evident to an intelligence which would be in a state to seize and appreciate all the actions and re-actions of the minds and bodies of those who contribute to this revolution. System of Nature, vol i.

·NOTES, 117 does occupy, or act in any other place than it does act. The idea of necessity is obtained by our experience of the connection between objects, the uniformity of the operations of nature, the constant conjunction of similar events, and the consequent inference of one from the other. Mankind are therefore agreed in the admission of necessity, if they admit that these two circumstances take place in voluntary action. Motive is, to voluntary action in the human mind, what cause is to effect in the material universe. The word liberty, as applied to mind, is analogous to the word cbance, as applied to matter: they spring from an ignorance of the certainty of the conjunction of antecedents and consequents. Every human being is irresistibly impelled to act precisely as he does act: in the eternity which preceded his birth, a chain of causes was generated, which, operating under the name of motives, make it impossible that any thought of his mind, or any action of his life, should be otherwise than it is. Were the doctrine of Necessity false, the human mind would no longer be a legitimate object of science; from like causes it would be in vain that we should expect like effects; the strongest motive would no longer be paramount over the conduct; all knowledge would be vague and undeterminate; we could not predict with any certainty, that we might not meet as an enemy to-morrow, him with whom we have parted in friendship to-night; the most probable inducements and the clearest reasonings would lose the invariable influence they pos- The contrary of this is demonstrably the fact: sess.

·118 NOTES. Similar circumstances produce the same unvariable effects. The precise character and motives of any man on any occasion being given, the moral philosopher could predict his actions with as much certainty as the natural philosopher could predict the effects of the mixture of any particular chemical substances. Why is the aged husbandman more experienced than the young beginner ? Because there is an uniform, undeniable necessity in the operations of the material universe. Why is the old statesman more skilful than the raw politician? Because, relying on the necessary conjunction of motive and action, be proceeds to produce moral effects, by the application of those moral causes which experience has shewn to be effectual. Some actions may be found to which we can attach no motives, but these are the effects of causes with which we are unacquainted. Hence the relation which motive bears to voluntary action is that of cause to effert; nor, placed in this point of view, is it, or ever has it been the subject of popular or philosophical dispute. None but the few fanatics who are engaged in the Herculean task of reconciling the justice of their God with the misery of man, will longer outrage common sease by the supposition of an event without a carise, a voluntary action without a motive. History, politics, morals, criticism, all grounds of reasoning, all principles of science, alike assume the truth of the doctrine of Necessity. No farmer carrying his corn to market doubts the sale of it at the market price. The master of a manufactory po.more doubts that he can purchase the human labour necessary for his pur. * ·NOTES. 119 poses, than that his machinery will act as they have been accustomed to act. But, whilst none have scrupled to admit necessity as influencing matter, many have disputed its domipion over mind. Independently of its militating with the received ideas of the justice of God, it is by no means obvious to a superficial enquiry. When the mind observes its own operations, it feels no connection of motive and action: but as we know “ nothing more of causation than the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent inference of one from the other, as we find that these two circumstances are universally allowed to have place in voluntary action, we may be easily led to own that they are subjected to the necessity common to all causes." The actions of the will have a regular conjunction with circumstances and characters; motive is, to voluntary action, what cause is to effect. But the only idea we can form of causation is a constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other: wherever this is the case necessity is clearly established. The idea of liberty, applied metaphorically to the will, has sprung from a misconception of the meaning of the word power. What is power?-id quod potesta, that which can produce any given effect. To deny power, is to say that nothing can or has the power to be or act. In the only true sense of the word power, it applies with equal force to the loadstone as to the . That which can do any thing.

·120 NOTES, human will. Do you think these motives, which I shall present, are powerful enough to rouse him? is a question just as common as, Do you think this lever has the power of raising this weight? The advocates of free-will assert that the will has the power of refusing to be determined by the strongest motive: but the strongest motive is that which, overcoming all others, ultimately prevails; this assertion therefore amounts to a denial of the will being ultimately determined by that motive which does determine it, which is absurd. But it is equally certain that a man cannot resist the strongest motive, as that he cannot overcome a physical impossibility. The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established potions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of any given line of conduct. Desert, in the present sense of the word, would no longer have any meaning; and he, who should inftict pain upon another for no better reason than that he deserved it, would only gratify bis revenge under pretence of satisfying justice. It is not enough, says the advocate of free-will, that a criminal should be prevented from a repetition of bis crime: he should feel pain, and his torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to his fault. But utility is morality; that wbich is incapable of producing bappiness is useless; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned, yet the frightful torments which ·NOTES, 121 revenge, under the name of justice, inflicted on this unhappy man, cannot be supposed to bave augmented, even at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world. At the same time the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our disapprobation of vice. The conviction which all feel, that a viper is a poisonous animal, and that a tyger is constrained, by the inevitable condition of his existence, to devour men, does not induce is to avoid them less sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in destroying them: but be would surely be of a hard heart, who, meeting with a serpent on a desart island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury, should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessarian is inconsequent to his own principles, if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of injuring him: he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes; wbilst cowardice, curiosity and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and rejected the delusions of free-will. Religion is the perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe. But if the principle of the universe be not an organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between it and human beings is absolutely none. Witbout some insight into its will respecting our actions, religion is nugatory and vain. But will is only a mode of animal mind; moral qualities also are such as only a ·122 NOTES. human being cau possess; to attribute them to the priociple of the universe, is to annex to it properties jucompatible with any possible definition of its nature. It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceived in the universe. By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities and governing the upiverse as an earthly monarch goverus his kingdom. Their addresses to this imaginary being, indeed, are much in the same style as those of subjects to a king. They acknowledge bis benevolence, deprecate his anger, and supplicate his favour. But the doctrine of Necessity teaches us, that in no case could any event have bappened otherwise than it did happen, and that, if God is the author of good, he is also the author of evil; that, if he is entitled to our gratitude for the one, he is entitled to our hatred for the other; that, admitting the existence of this hypothetic being, he is also subjected to the dominion of ap. immutable necessity. It is plain that the same arguments which prove that God is the author of food, light, and life, prove him also to be the author of poison, darkness, and death. The wide-wasting earthquake, the storm, the battle, and the tyranny, are attri. butable to this hypothetic being in the same degree as the fairest forms of nature, sunshine, liberty, and peace. But we are taught, by the doctrine of Necessity, that there is neither good nor evil in the universe, otherwise than as the events to which we apply these ·NOTES. 123 epithets have relation to our own peculiar mode of being. Still less than with the hypothesis of a God, will the doctrine of Necessity accord with the belief of a future state of punishment. God made man such as he is, and then damned him for being so: for to say that God was the author of all good, and man the author of all evil, is to say that one man made a straight line and a crooked one, and another man made the incongruity. A Mahometan story, much to the present purpose, is recorded, wherein Adam and Moses are introduced dispnting before God in the following manner. Thou, says Moses, art Adam, whom God created, and animated with the breath of life, and caused to be worshipped by the angels, and placed in Paradise, from whence mankind have been expelled for thy fault. Whereto Adam answered, Thou art Moses, whom God chose for his apostle, and entrusted with bis word, by giving thee the tables of the law, and whom he vouchsafed to admit to discourse with himself. How many years dost thou find the law was written before I was created ? Says Moses, Forty. And dost thou not find, replied Adam, these words therein, And Adam rebelled against his Lord and transgressed? Which Moses confessing, Dost thou therefore blame me, continued he, for doing that which God wrote of me that I should do, forty years before I was created, nay, for what was decreed concerning me fifty thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth? Sale's Prelim. Disc. to the Koran, p. 164.

·124 NOTES, VII. PAGE 61. There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe, remains unshaken. A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition, is the only secure way of attaining truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant: our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a subject of such importance, that it cannot be too minutely investigated; in consequence of this conviction we proceed briefly and impartially to examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to consider the nature of belief. When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief. Many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from being immediate; these the mind attempts to remove, in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation, in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation wbich the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive: the investigation being confused with the perception, has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief,- that belief is an act of volition,-in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they bave attached a degree of ·NOTES. 125 criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature, it is incapable: it is equally incapable of merit. Belief, then, is a passion, the strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of excitement. The degrees of excitement are three. The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind; consequently their evidence claims the strongest assent. The decision of the mind, founded upon our own experience, derived from these sources, claims the next degree. The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree. (A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capabilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just barometer of the belief which ought to be attached to them.) Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason; reason is founded on the evidence of our senses. Every proof may be referred to one of these three divisions: it is to be considered what arguments we receive from each of them, which should convince us of the existence of a Deity. 1st. The evidence of the senses. If the Deity should appear to us, if he should convince our senses, of his existence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared bave the strongest possible conviction of his existence.

·126 NOTES, But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility. 2d. Reason. It is urged that man knows that whatever is, must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity: be also knows, that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated, we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. Iu a case where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is Jeast incomprehensible;-it is easier to suppose that the universe bas existed from all eternity, than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen? The other argument, which is founded on a man's knowledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequenti oference of one from the other; and, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer from effects, causes exactly adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instru- ·NOTES. 127 ments: we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments; nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration: we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omuiscient, omnipotent being, leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible. 3d. Testimony. It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity convinces the senses of men of his existence, can only be admitted by us, if our mind considers it less probable that these men should bave been deceived, than that the Deity should bave appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational; for he commanded that he should be believed, he proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions; belief is not an act of volition; the mind is even passive, or involuntarily active: from this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or ratber that testi. mony is insufficient to prove the being of a God. It has been before shewn that it cannot be deduced from reason. They alone, then, who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses, can believe it. Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God: it is also evident, that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; and that they ·128 NOTES. only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false médium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandia rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says: Hypotheses non fingo, quicquid enim ex plucnomenis non deducitur, hypothesis vocanda est, et hypothesis vel metaphysicæ, vel physicæ, vel qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicæ, in philosophid locum non habentb. To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers: we merely know their effects; we are in a state of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things; but the pride of pbilosopby is unwilling to adnit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena, which are the objects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical cona The burthen of proof. b I do not invent hypothesis ; for whatever is not deduced from phænomena, is to be called an hypothesis ; and hypotheses, either metaphysical or physical, or grounded on occult qualitics, should not be allowed any room in philosophy.

·NOTES. 129 ceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effluvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulo of Herschel. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; be contained under every prædicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him: they exclaim with the French poel, Pour dire ce qu'il est, il faut élre lui-méme, a Lord Bacon says, that “ Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to repltation: all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore atbeism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no farther, and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times: but superstition bath beca the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. Bacon's Moral Essay on Superstition. - To tell what he is, you must be liiniself. 9 ·130 NOTES. a La première théologie de l'homme lui fit d'abord craindre et adorer les élémeos même, des objets matériels et grossiers; il rendit ensuite ses hommages à des agens présidens aux élémens, à des génies inférieurs, à des héros, ou á des hommes doués de grands qualitès. A force de rófléchir il crut simplifier les choses en soumettant la nature entière à un seul agent, à un esprit, à une âme 'universelle, qui mettoit cette nature et ses parties en mouvement. En remontant des causes en causes, les mortels ont fini par ne rien voir; et c'est dans cette obscurité qu'ils ont placé leur Dieu; c'est dans cette abime ténébreux que leur imagination inquiète travaille toujours à se fabriquer des chimères, que les amigeront jusqu'à ce que la connoissance de la nature less détrompe des phantômes qu'ils ont toujours si vainement adorés. Si nous voulons nous rendre compte de nos idées sur • The primary theology of man made him first fear and worship even the elements gross and inaterial objects, he then paid his adorations to the presiding agents of the elements, to inferior genii, lo beroes, or to men endowed with great qualities. By continuing to reflect he thought to simplify things, by submitting all nature to a single agent, to a spirit, to an universal soul, which put this nature, and its parts into motion. In ascending from cause, to cause, mankind have ended, by sceing nothing, and it is in the midst of this obscurity, that they have placed their God; it is in this dark abyes, that their restless imagination, is always labouring to form chimeras, which will afflict them, until a knowledge of nature shall dissipate the phantoms which they have always so vainly adored. If we wish to render an account to oursclves, of our ideas respecting the Deity, we shall be obliged to confess that by the word God, men have never been able to designate any thing else but the most hidden, the most remote, the most unknown cause of the effects which they perceive; they only make use of this word, when the springs of natural and kuown causes cease to be visible to them; the instant they lose the thread, or their un- ·NOTES, 131 la Divinité, nous serons obligés de convenir que, par le mot Dieu, les hommes n'ont jamais pu désigner que la cause la plus cachée, la plus éloiguée, la plus inconnue des effets qu'ils voyoient: ils ne font usage de ce mot, que lorsque le jeu des causes naturelles et connues cesse d'être visible pour eux; dès qu'ils perdent le fit de ces canses, ou dès que leur esprit ne peut plus en suivre la chaîne, ils tranchent leur difficulté, et terminent leur recherches en apellent Dieu la dernière des causes, c'est-à-dire celle qui est au-delà de toutes les causes qu'ils connoisseut; ainsi ils ne font qu'assigner une dénomination vague à une cause iguorée, à laquelle leur paresse ou les bornes de leurs conjoissances les forcent de s'arrêter. Toutes les fois qu'on que Dieu est l'auteur de quelque phénomène, cela signifie qu'on ignore comment un tel phénomène a pu s'opèrer par le sècours des forces ou des causes que nous dit derstanding can no longer follow the chain of these causes, they cut the knot of their difficulty and terminate their researches by calling God thic last of these causes, that is to say, that which is beyond all the causes with which they are acquainted. Thus they merely assign a vague denomination to an unknown canse, at which their indolence or the limits of their iaformation compels them to stop. Whenever we are told, that God is the author of any phenonienon, that signifies that we are ignorant how such a phenomenon can be produced, with the assistance only of the natural powers or causes with which we are acquainted. It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignoradice, atıribute to the Deity, not only the unconmon effects which strike them, but even the most simple events, whose causes are the most easily discoverable, to all who have had the opportunity of reflecting on thein. In a word man has always respected the unknown causes of those surprising cffects, which his ignorance prevented him from unravelling. It was upon the ruins of nature that men first raised the imaginary colossus of a Deity.

·132 NOTES. nous connoissons dans la nature. C'est ainsi que le commun des hommes, dont l'ignorance est la partage, attribue à la Divinité non seulement les effets inusités que les frappent, mais encore les événemens les plus simples, dont les causes sont les plus faciles à connoitre pour quiconque a pu les méditer. En un mot, l'homme a toujours respecté les causes inconnues des effets surprenans, que son ignorance l'empêchoit de démêler. Ce fut sur les débris de la nature que les hommes élevèrent le colosse imaginaire de la Divinité. Si l'ignorance de la nature donna la paissance aux dieux, la connoissance de la nature est faite pour les detruire. A inésure que l'homme s'instruit, ses forces et ses ressources augmentent avec ses lumières; les sciences, les arts conservateurs, l'industrie, lui fournissent des secours; l'expérience le rassure, ou lui procure des moyens de résister aux efforts de bien des causes qui If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, a knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. la proportion as man becomes inforined, his powers and resources increase with his knowledge, the sciences, the conservative arts, and industry furnish him with assistance, experience inspires him with confidence, or procures liu tlic mcans of resisting tlie efforts of many causcs, which cease to alarni him, as soon as he becomes acquaiuled with them. In a word, his terrors are dissipated in the sane proportion as his mind is enlightened. A well infouined man ceases to be superstitious. It is never but on trust, that whole nations worship the God of their fathers, and their priests; authority, confidence, submission, and custom, to thein supply the place of proofs and conviction; they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers have taught them to prostrate themsc!ves and pray, but wherefore did the latter kncel? Because in remote periods, their guides and regulators, taught them it was a duty. “Worship and believe," said they “gods which you canuot comprehend, rely on our profound wisdom, we know more than you concerning the Deity." “But why ·NOTES. 133 En un cessent de l'alarmer dès qu'il les a connues. mot, ses terreurs se dissipent dans la même proportion que son esprit s'éclaire. L'homme instruit cesse d'etre superstitieux, Ce n'est jamais que sur parole que des peuples entiers' adorent le Dieu de leurs pères et de leurs prêtres: l'autorité, la confiance, la soumission, et l'habitude, leur tiennent lieu de conviction et de preuves; ils se prosternent et prient, parce que leurs pères leur ont appris à se prosterner et prier: mais pourquoi ceux-ci se sont-ils mis à genoux? C'est q'e dans les temps éloignés leurs législateurs et leurs guides leur en ont fait un devoir. “Adorez et croyez," ont-ils dit, " des dieux que vous ne pouvez comprendre; rapportez-vous en à notre sagesse profonde; nous en savons plus que vous sur la Divinité.” “Mais pourquoi m'en rapporterois-je à vous?” “C'est que Dien le veut ainsi, c'est que Dieu vous punira si vous osez résister.” Mais ce Dieu n'estil donc pas la chose en question ?" Cependant les homshould I rely on you?" "Because it is the will of God, because he will punislı you if you dare to resist." “ But is not this God the thing in question?" Thus men havc always been satisfied with this vicious circle, the indolence of their minds led them to believe the shorter mode was to rely upon the opinions of others. All religious notions, are founded upon authority alone, all the religions of the world forbid investigation, and will not permit reasoning; it is authority which requires us to believe in God, this God himself is only founded upon the authority of some men, who pretend to know him, and to be sent by him to announce him to the world. A God made by men has doubtless need of men to make hiin known to men. Is it then only, for the priests of'tie inspired, for metaphysicians, that a conviction of the existence of a God is reserved, and which is nevertheless said to be necessary to all niankind. But do we find a harniony of these logical opinion among the inspired, or the reflective, in the dittcnut parts ·194 NOTES, mes se sont toujours payós de ce cercle vicieux; la paresse de leur esprit leur fit trouver plus court de s'en rapporter au jugement des autres. Toutes les notions religieuses sont fondées uniqħement sur l'autorité; toutes les religions du monde defendent l'examen et ne veulent pas que l'on raisonne; c'est l'autorité que veut qu'nu crut en Dieu; ce Dieu n'est lui-même fondé que sur l'autorité de quelques hoinmes qui prétendent le connoître, et venir de sa part pour l'annoncer a la terre. Un Dieu fait par les hommes, a sans doute besoin des hommes pour se faire connoître aux boinmes. Ne seroit-ce donc que pour des prêtres des inspirés, des metaphysiciens que seroit reservée la conviction de l'existence d'un Dieu, que l'on dit neanmoins si necessaire à tout le genre-humain ? Mais trouvonsnous de l'harınonie entre les opinions théologiques des differens inspirés, ou des penseurs répandus sur la terre? Ceux méme que font profession d'adorer le même Dieu, sont-ils d'accord sur son compte? Sont-ils contents of the world? Are those cven who profess to worship the same God agreed respecting him? Are they satisficd with the proofs of his existence which their colleagues bring forward? Do they unanimously subscribe to the ideas which they adduce respecting his nature, bis conduct, and the mode of understanding his pretended oracles? Is there a country, throughout the earth in wliich the knowledge of God is really perfccted. Has it assumed in any quarter the consistency, and uniformity, which we perceive human hnowlerige to have assumed, in the most trilling arts, in trades the most despised. The words spirit, immuteriulity, creution, predestination, grace, this croud of subtile distinctions with which thcology, in some countrics, is universally filled, thesc ingenious invcíntions, imagined by the successive reasoners of ages, have, alas! only embroiled the question, and never has thic science, the most important to mankind, been able to acquire the least stability. For thousands of years, have these idle drcaniers transnuitted to ·NOTES. 135 des preuves que leurs collègues apportent de son existence? Souscrivent-ils unanimement aux idées qu'ils presentent sur sa nature, sur sa conduite, sur la façon d'entendre ses prétendus oracles? Est-il une contrée sur la terre, où la science de Dieu se soit réellement perfectionné ? A-t-elle pris quelque part la consistence et l'uniformité que nous voyous prendre aux connoissances humaines, aux arts les plus futiles, aus métiers les plus meprisés? des mots d'esprits, d'iminatérialité, de création, de prédeslination, de grace; cette foule de distinctions subtiles dont la théologie s'est partout remplie dans quelques pays, ces inventions si, ingenieuses, imaginées par des penseurs que se sont succédés depuis tant de siècles, n'ont fait, belas! qu'embrouilles les choses, et jamais le science le plus necessaire aux hommes n'a jusqu'ici pu acquérir la moindre fixité. Depuis des milliers d'années, ces reveurs oisifs se sont perpétuellement relayés pour mediter la Divinité, pour deviner ses voies cachées, pour inventer des hypotheses each other, the task of meditating on tlic Deity, of discovering his secret paths, of inventing hypotheses calculated to solve this important enigma. The little success they have met with, has not discouraged theological vanity. God has always been talked of, mankind lave cut each others throats for him, and this great being still continues, to be the most unknown, and the most sought after. Fortunate would it have been for mankind if confining themselves to the visible objects in which they are interested, they had employed in pero fccting true science, laws, morals, and education, half the exertions they have made in their researches after a Deity. They would have been still wiser and more fortunate, could they have resolved to leave their blind guides to quarrel among themselves and to sound the depths calculated only to turn their brains without meddling with their senseless disputes. But it is the very essence of ignorance to attach importance to wbut it ·136 NOTES, propres à développer cette enigme importante. Leur peu de succés n'a point découragé la vanité théologique; toujours on a parlé de Dieu: on s'est égorgé pour lui, et cet étre sublime denieure toujours le plus ignoré et le plus discuté. Les hommes auroient été trop heureux, si, se bornant aux objets visibles qui les intéressent, ils eussent employé à perfectionner leurs sciences réelles, leurs loix, leur morale, leur éducation, la moitié des efforts qu'ils ont mis dans leurs recherches sur la Divinité. Ils auroient été bien plus suges encore, et plus fortunés s'ils eussent pu consentir à laisser leurs guides descuvrés se quereller entre eux, et sonder des profondeurs capables de les étourdir, sans se mêler de leurs disputes insensées. Mais il est de l'essence de l'ignorance d'attacher de l'importance à ce qu'elle ne comprend pas. La vanité humaine fait que l'esprit se roidit contre les difficultés. Plus un objet se dérobe à nos yeux, plus nous faisons d'efforts pour le saisir, parce que dès-lors docs not understand. Human vanity is such that the mind becane irritated by difficulty. In proportion as an object fades from our sight do we exert ourselves to seize it, because it then stimulates our pride, it excites our curiosity and beconies interesting. In contending for his God every one in fact is only contending for the interests of his own vanity, which of all the passions, produced by the mal-organization of society, is the most prompt to take alarnu, and the most calculated to give birth, to great absurdities. If laying aside for a moment the gloomy idcas which thcology gives us of a capricious God, whose partial and despotic decrees decide the fatos of men, wc fix our eyes upon the pretended goodness which all nien, even whilst trenbling before this God, agrec in giving to him, if we suppose him to be actuated by the project which is altributed to him, of baving only laboured for his own glory, of exacting the adoration of intelligent ·NOTES, 197 il aiguillone notre orgueil, il excite notre curiosité, il nous paroit intéressant. Eu combattant pour son Dieu, chacun ne combattit en effet que pour les intérêts de sa propre vanité, qui de toutes les passions produits par la mal organization de la societé, est la plus prompte à s'allarıner, et la plus propre à produire des tres grands folies. Si écartant pour un moment les idées facheuses que la théologie nous donne d'un Dieu capricieux, dont les décrets parteaux et despotiques décident du sort des humains, nous ne voulons fixer nos yeux que sur la bonté prétendue, que tous les hommes, méme en tremblant devant ce Dieu, s'accordant à lui donner; si nous lui supposons le projet qu'on lui prête, de n'avoir travaillé que pour sa propre gloire, d'exiger les hommages des êtres intelligens; de ne chercher dans ses @uvres que le bien-être du genre humain; comment concilier ses vues et ses dispositions avec l'ignorance vraiment invincible dans lequelle ce Dieu, si glorieux et si bon, beings, of seeking only in his works, the welfare of the human race; how can we reconcile bis views and dispositions with the truly invincible ignorance in which this God so good and glorious leaves the greater part of mankind respecting himself? If God wishes to be known, beloved, and praised, why does he not reveal himself under some favourable features, to all those intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and wor. shipped! Why does he not manifest to all the earth in an unequivocal manner, much more calculated to convince us, than by these particular revelations which scem to accuse the Deity of an unjust partiality for some of his creatures. Would not the Omnipotent possess more convincing means of revealing himself to mankind than these ridioulous fueta. morphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested to us by writers who so little agree among theinselves in the recitals they give of theni? Instead of so many niiiacles invented to prove the divine mission ·138 NOTES. laisse la plupart des hommes sur son compte ? Si Dieu veut être connu, cheri, remercié, que de se montre-t-il sous des traits favorables à tous ces êtres intelligens dont il veut être aimé et adoré ? Pourquoi ne point se manifester à toute la terre d'une façon non équivoque, bien plus capable de vous conraincre, que ces révélations particuliers qui semblent accuser la Divinité d'une partialité facheuse pour quelqu'uns de ses créatures? Le tout-puissant n'auroit-il donc pas des moyens plus convinqnans de se montrer aux hommes que ces métamorphoses ridicules, ces incarnations prétendues, qui nous sont attestées par des écrivains si peu d'accord entre eux dans les récits qu'ils en font? Au lieu de tant de miracles, inventés pour prouver la mission divine de tant de législateurs, révérés par les différeus peuples du monde, le souverain des esprits ne pouvoit-il pas convaincre tout d'un coup l'esprit humain des choses qu'il a voula 'ui faire connoître ? Au lieu de suspendre un soleil dans la voûte du firmament; au lieu de repandre sans ordre les étoiles, et les constellations qui of so many legislators revered by the different nations of the world, could not the Supreme Being convince in an instant the human mind of the things which he chose to make known to it? Instead of suspending the sun in the vault of the firmament, instead of dispersing the stars and the constellations, which occupy space without order, would it not have been nore conformable to the views of a God so jealous of liis glory, and so well disposed to man, to write in a mode not liable to be disputed, his name, his attributes, and his unchangeable will, in everlasting characters, equally legible to all the inhabitants of the earth? No one could then have doubted the cxistence of a God, his manifest will, his visible intentions, Under the eye of this terrible Deity, no one would have had the audacity to violate his ordinances, no mortal would have dared to place himself in the situation of drawing down his wrath; and, lastly, no man would ·NOTES. 139 remplissent l'espace, n'eut-il pas été plus conforme aux vues d'un Dieu si jaloux de sa gloire et si bien intentionné pour l'homme; d'ecrire d'une façon non sujette à dispute, son nom, ses attributs, ses volontés permanentes, en caractères ineffaçables, et lisibles également pour tous les habitants de la terre? Personne alors n'auroit pu douter de l'existence d'un Dieu, de ses volontis claires, de ses intentions visibles. Sous les yeux de ce Dieu si terrible, personne n'auroit eu l'audace de violer ses ordonnances; nul mortel n'eût ose se mettre dans le cas d'attirer sa colère: enfin nul homme n'eut eu le front d'en imposer en son nom, ou d'interpréter ses volontés suivant ses propres phantasies. En effet, quand même on admetteroit l'existence du Dieu théologique, et la realité des attributs si discordaus qu'on lui donne, l'on ne peut en rien conclure, pour autoriser la conduite ou les cultes qu'on prescrit de lui rendre. La théologie est vraiment le tonneau des Danaides. A force de qualities contradictoires et d'ashave had the effrontery to impose on his fellow creatures, in the name of the Deity, or to interpret his will according to his own fancy, In fact, even should the existence of the tlieological God be admitted, and the reality of the discordant attributes which are given to him, nothing could bc inferred from it, to authorise the conduct or the modes of worship, which we are told to observe towards him. Theology is truly the tub of the Dunuides. By dint of contradictory qualitics and rash assertions, it has so trammelled, as it were, its God, that it has made it impossible for him to act. If he is infinitely good, what reason have we to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we be uneasy for our future stato? If he knows all, why inform him of our wants, and teasc him with our prayers * If he is onnipresent, why raise temples to him? If he is master of all, why sacrifice and make offerings to him? If he is just, low can we believe that ·140 NOTES. sertions hazardées, elle a, pour aiusi dire, tellement garoté son Dieu qu'elle a mis dans l'impossibilité d'agir. S'il est infiniment bon quelle raison aurions-nous de le craindre? S'il est infiniment sage, de quoi nous inquieter sur notre sort? S'il sait tout, pourquoir l'avertir de nos besoins, et le fatiguer de nos prières ? S'il est partout, pourquoi lui élever des temples ? S'il est maître de tout, pourquoi lui faire des sacrifices et des offrandes ? S'il est juste, comment croire qu'il punisse des créatures qu'il a rempli des foiblesses? Si la grace fait tout en elles, quelle raison auroit-il de les recompenser? S'il est tout-puissant, comment l'offenser, comment lui resister? S'il est raisonnable, comment se mettroit-il en colère contre des aveugles, à qui il a laissé la liberté de déraisonner? S'il est immuable, de quel droit pretendrions-nous faire changer ses decrets? S'il est inconcevable,. pourquoi nous en occuper? S'IL A PARLE', POURQUOI L'UNIVERS N'EST-IL PAS CONVAINCU? Si la connoissance d'un Dieu est la plus nécessaire, pourquoi n'est-elle pas la plus évidente, et la plus claire. Système de la Nalure, London, 1781. he punishes creatures whom he has afflicted with weaknesses? If grace does all in them, for what reason should he reward them? If he is omni. potcnt how can we offend, how resist himn? If he is reasonable, how could he be incensed against bis blind creatures, to whom he has only left the libcrty of falling into error ? If he is immutable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is incomprehensible, why do we busy ourselves in endeavouring to understand him? If HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS NOT THE'UNIVERSE CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is not the clearest and most evident?-System of Nature, Loron, 1781.

·NOTES, 141 The enlightened and benevolent Pliny thus publicly professes himself-an atheist :-Quapropter efligiem Dei, formamque quærere, imbecillitatis humanæ reor. Quis. quis est Deus (si modo est alius) et quacunque in parte, totus est sensus, totus est visus, totus auditus, totus animæ, totus animi, totus sui. Imperfectæ vero in homine naturæ præcipua solatia De deum quidem posse omnia. Namque nec sibi po. test mortem consciscere, si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitæ pænis : nec mortales æternitate donare, aut revocare defunctos; nec facere ut qui vixit non vixerit, qui bonores gessit non gesserit, nullumque babere in præteritum jus, præterquam oblivionis, atque (ut facetis quoque argumentis societas bæc cum deo copuletur) ut bis dena viginta non sint, et multa similiter efficere non posse. -Per quæ, declaratur haud dubie, naturæ potentiam id quoque esse, quod Deum vocamus, -Plin. Nat. His. cap. de Deo. a For which reason, I consider that the inquiry after the formu and figure of the Deity, must be attributed to human weakness. Whatever God may be (if indeed there be one) and wherever he may exist, he must be all sense, all sight, all hearing, all life, all mind, self-cxistent. But it is a great consolation to man with all his infirmities to reflect that God himself cannot do all things : for he cannot inflict on himself death, even if he should wish to die, that best of gifts to mian amidst the cares and sufferings of life; neither can he make mon nur raise the dead, nor prevent those who have lived from living, nor those who have borne honours from wearing thein ; he lias no power over the past, except that of oblivion, and (to relax our gravity awhile and indulge in a joke) he cannot prevent twice ten froth being twenty, and many other things of a similar nature. From these observations it is clearly apparent that the powers of uature are what we call God. P'lin. Mut. llist.

·142 NOTES. The consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist. See Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions, chap. iii.-Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads, as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation : but surely it is more consistent with the good faith of philosophy to admit a · deduction from facts, than an hypothesis incapable of proof, although it might militate with the obstinate preconceptions of the mob. Flad this author, instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have been more suited to the modesty of the sceptic, and the toleration of the philosopher. Omnia enim per Dei potentiam facta sunt: imo, quia natura potentia nulla est nisi ipsa Dei potentia, autem est nos eatenus Dei potentiam non intelligere, quatenus causas naturales ignoramus; adeoque stulte ad eandem Dei potentiam recurritur, quando rei alicujus, causam naturalem, sive est, ipsam Dei potentiam ignoramus. Spinosa, Tract. Theologico-Pol. chap. i. p. 14. * All things are made by the power of God, yet, doubtless, because the power of nature is the power of God: besides wc are upable to understand thc power of God, so far as we are ignorant of natural causes; therefore we foolishly recur to the power of God whenever we are unacquainted with the natural cause of any thing, or in other words, with the power of God-Spinosa, Truct. Theologici. Pol. chap. i. p. 14.

·NOTES. 143 VII. PAGE 63. Ahasuerus, risc ! Abasuerus the Jew crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel. Near two thousand years have elapsed since he was first goaded by never-ending restlessness, to rove the globe from pole to pole. When our Lord was wearied with the burthea of bis pondcrous cross, and wanted to rest before the door of Ahasuerus, the unfeeling wretch drove bim away with brutality. The Saviour of mankind staggered, sinking under the heavy load, but uttered no complaint. An angel of death appeared before Ahasuerus, and exclaimed indignantly, “ Barbarian! thou hast denied rest to the Son of Man: be it denied thee also, until he comes to judge the world." A black demon, let loose from bell upon Ahasuerus, goads him now from country to country; he is denied the consolation which death affords, and precluded from the rest of the peaceful grave. Ahasuerus crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel-he shook the dust from his beard--and taking up one of the sculls hea ped there, hurled it down the eminence: it rebounded from the earth in shivered atoms. This was my father! roared Ahasuerus. Seven more sculls rolled down from rock to rock; while the infuriate Jew, following them with glastly looks exclaimed - And these were my wives! He still continued to burl down scull after scull, ronring in dreadful accents—And these, and these, and these were iny ·144 NOTES children! They could die; but, I! reprobate wretch, alas! I cannot die! Dreadful beyond conception is the judgment that hangs over me. Jerusalem fell I crushed the sucking babe, and precipitated myself into the destructive flames. I cursed the Romansbut, alas! alas! the restless curse held me by the hair, -and I could not die ! Rome the giantess fell I placed myself before the falling statue--she fell, and did not crush me. Nations sprung up and disappeared before me ;--but I remained and did not die. From cloud-encircled cliffs did I precipitate myself into the ocean; but the foaming billows cast me upon the shore, and the burning arrow of existence pierced my cold heart again. I leaped into Etna's flaming abyss, and roared with the giants for ten long months, polluting with my groans the Mount's sulphureous moulb-ah! ten long months. The volcano fermented, and in a fiery stream of lava cast me up. I lay torn by the torture-snakes of hell amid the glowing cinders, and yet continued to exist. A forest was on fire: I darted on wings of fury and despair into the crackling wood. Fire dropped upon me from the trees, but the flames only singed my limbs; alas! it could not consume them.--I now mixed with the butchers of mankind, and plunged in the tempest of the raging battle. I roared Hefiance to the infuriate Gaul, defiance to the victorious German; but arrows and spears rebounded in shivers from my body. 'The Saracen's flaming sword broke upon my scull; balls in vain hissed upon me: the lightnings of battle glared harmless around my loins: in vain did the ele- ·NOTES. 145 I now prophant trample on me, in vain the iron hoof of the wrathful steed! The mine, big with destructive power, burst upon me, and hurled me high in the air-I fell on heaps of smoking limbs, but was only singed. The giant's steel club rebounded from my body; the executioner's hand could not strangle me; the tyger's tooth could not pierce me, nor would the bungry lion in the circus devour me. I cohabited with poisonous snakes, and pinched the red crest of the dragon. The serpent stung, but could not destroy me;-the dragon tormented, but dared not to devour me. voked the fury of tyrants: I said to Nero, Thou art a bloodhound! I said to Christiern, Thou art a blood. hound! I said to Muley Ismail, Thou art a bloodhound! —The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did ritot kill me. -Ha! not to be able to die---not to be able to die--not to be permitted to rest after the toils of life-to be doomed to be imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon- to be for ever clogged with this worthless body, its load of diseases and infirmities--to be condemned to hold for milenniums that yawning monster Sameness and Time, that hungry hyena, ever bearing children, and ever devouring again her offspring! Ha! not to be permitted to die! Awful arenger in heaven, bast thou in thine armoury of wrath a punishment more dreadful ? then let it thunder upon me, command a hurricane to sweep me down to the foot of Carmel, that I there may lie extended; may pant, and writbe, and die! This fragment is the translation of part of some Ger- 10 ·146 NOTES. man work, whose title 1 have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincoln's-Inn Fields. VII. PAGE 66. I will beget a Son, and he shall bear The sins of all the world. A book is put into our hands when children, called the Bible, the purport of whose history is briefly this: That God made the earth in six days, and there planted a delightful garden, in which he placed the first pair of human beings. In the midst of the garden be planted a tree, whose fruit, although within their reach, they were forbidden to touch. That the Devil, in the shape of a snake, persuaded them to eat of this fruit; in consequence of which God condemned both them and their posterity yet unborn to satisfy his justice by their eternal misery. That, four thousand years after these events, (the human race in the mean while having gone unredeemed to perdition,) God engendered with the betrothed wife of a carpenter in Judea (whose virginity was nevertheless uninjured), and begat a Son, whose name was Jesus Christ; and who was crucified and died, in order that no more men might be devoted to hell-fire, he bearing the burthen of his Father's displeasure by proxy. The book states, in addition, that tbe soul of whoever disbelieves this sacrifice will be burned with everlasting fire. During many ages of misery and darkness this story ·NOTES. 147 gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected that it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men, who derived and still derive immense emoluments from this opinion, in the shape of a popular belief, told the vulgar, that, if they did not believe in the Bible, they would be damned to all eternity; and burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected enquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become more ênlightened, will allow. 'The belief in all that the Bible contains, is called Christianity. A Roman Governor of Judea, at the instance of a priest-led mob, crucified a man called Jesus eighteen centuries ago. He was a man of pure life, who desired to rescue his countrymen from the tyranny of their barbarous and degrading superstitions. The common fate of all who desire to benefit mankind awaited him. The rabble, at the iustigation of the priests, demanded his death, although his very judge made public acknowledgment of his innocence. Jesus was sacrificed to the honour of that God with whom he was afterwards confounded. It is of importance, therefore to distinguish between the pretended character of this being, as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, and his real character as a man, who, for a vain attempt to reform the world, paid the forfeit of his life to that overbearing tyranny which has since so long desolated the universe in his name. Whilst the one is a hypocritical demon, who announces ·148 NOTES. himself as the God of compassion and peace, even whilst he stretches forth bis blood-red hand with the sword of discord to waste the earth, having confessedly devised this scheme of desolation from eternity; the other stands in the foremost list of those true heroes, who have died in the glorious martyrdom of liberty, and have braved torture, contempt, and poverty, in the cause of suffering humanitya. The vulgar, ever in extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event. Testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine. This belief, rolling through the lapse of ages, met with the reveries of Plato and the reasonings of Aristotle, and acquired force and extent, until the divinity of Jesus became a dogma, which to dispute was death, which to doubt was infamy. Christianity is now the established religion: he who attempts to impugn it, must be contented to behold murderers and traitors take precedence of him in public opinion; though, if his genius be equal to his courage, and assisted by a peculiar coalition of circumstanoes, future ages may exalt bim to a divinity, and persecute others in his name, as he was persecuted in the name of his predecessor in the homage of the world. The same means that have supported every other popular belief, have supported Christianity. War, . Since writing this n'te I have seen reason to suspect, that Jesus was an ambitious nian, who aspired to the throne of Judea.

·NOTES. 149 imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establisbment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe. We derive from our ancestors a faith thus fostered and supported: we quarrel, persecute, and late for its maintenance. Even under a government which, whilst it infringes the very right of thought and speech, boists of permitting the liberty of the press, a man is pilloried and imprisoned because he is a Deist, and no one raises his voice in the indignation of outraged humanity. But it is ever a proof that the falschood of a proposition is felt by those who use coercion, not reasoning, to procure its admission; and a dispassionate observer would feel hinself more powerfully interested in favour of a man, who, depending on the truth of his opinions, sinply stated his reasons for entertaining them, than in that of his aggressor, who, daringly avowing his unwillingness or incapacity to answer them by argument, proceeded to repress the energies and break the spirit of their promulgator by that torture and imprisonnent whose infliction he could command. Analogy seems to favour the opinion, that as, like other systems, Christianity bas ariseu and augmented, so like them it will decay and perisb; that, as violence, darkness, and deceit, not reasoning and persuasion, have procured its admission among mankind, so, when enthusiasm bas subsided, and time, that jutallible controverter of false opinions, bas involved its pre- ·150 NOTES. tended evidences in the darkness of antiquity, it will become obsolete; that Milton's poem alone will give permanency to the remembrance of its absurdities; and that men will laugh as heartily at grace, faith, redemption, and original sin, as they now do at the metamorphoses of Jupiter, the miracles of Romish saints, the efficacy of witchcraft, and the appearance of departed spirits. Had the Christian religion commenced and continued by the mere force of reasoning and persuasion, the preceding analogy would be inadmissible. We should never speculate on the future obsoleteness of a system perfectly conformable to nature and reason: it would endure so long as they endured; it would be a truth as indisputable as the light of the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, whose evidence, depending on our organization and relative situations, must remain acknowledged as satisfactory, so long as man is man. It is an incontrovertible fact, the consideration of which ought to repress the hasty conclusions of credulity, or moderate its obstinacy in maintaining them, that, bad the Jews not been a fanatical race of men, had even the resolution of Pontius Pilale. been equal to his candour, the Christian religion never could have prevailed, it could not even have existed: on so feeble a thread hangs the most cherished opinion of a sixth of the human race! When will the vulgar learn bumility ? When will the pride of ignorance blush at having believed before it could comprehend ? Either the Christian religion is true, or it is false; if true, it comes from God, and its authenticity can ·9 NOTES 151 admit of doubt and dispute no further than its omnipotent author is willing to allow. Either the power or the goodness of God is called in question, if be leaves those doctrines most essential to the well being of man in doubt and dispute; the only ones which, since their promulgation have been the subject of unceasing cavil, the cause of irreconcileable hatred. If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced? There is this passage in the Christian Scriptures : “ Those who obey not God, and believe not the Gospel of bis Son, shall be punished with everlasting destruction.” This is the pivot upon which all religions turn: they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to believe; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true. A human being can only be supposed accountable for those actions wbich are influenced by his will. But belief is utterly distinct from and unconnected with volition: it is the apprehension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas that compose any proposition. Belief is a passion, or involuntary operation of the mind, and, like other passions, its intensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excitement. Volition is essential to merit or demerit. But the Christian religion attaches the highest possible degrees of merit and demerit to that which is worthy of neither, "and which is totally unconnected with the peculiar faculty of the mind, whose presence is essential to their being. Christianity was intended to reform the world: had ·152 NOTES. an all-wise Being planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed: omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of a scheme which experience demonstrates, to tbis age, to have been utterly unsuccessful. Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may be considered under two points of view; as an eadeavour to change the intentious of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that be can do something better than reason. Christianity, like all other religions, rests upon miracles, prophesies, and martyrdows. No religion ever existed, which had not its prophets, its attested miracles, and, above all, crowds of devotees who would bear patiently the most horrible tortures to prove its authenticity. It should appear that in no case can a discriminating mind subscribe to the genuineness of a miracle. A miracle is an infraction of nature's law, by a supernatural cause; by a ciluse acting beyond that eternal circle within which all thingsare included.. God breaks through the law of nature, that he may convince mankind of the truth of that revelation which, in spite of bis precautions, has been, since its introduction, the subject of unceasing schism and cavil.

·NOTES, 153 Miracles resolve themselves into the following question:*--Whether it is more probable the laws of nature, hitherto so immutably harmonious, should have undergone violation, or that a man should have told a lie? Whether it is more probable that we are ignorant of the natural cause of an event, or that we know thie supernatural one? That, in old times, when the powers of nature were less known than at present, a certain set of men were themselves deceived, or had some hidden motive for deceiving others; or that God begat à son, wbo, in his legislation, measuring merit by belief, evidenced himself to be totally ignorant of the powers of the human mind-of what is voluntary, and what is the contrary? We have many iustances of men telling lies;- none of an infraction of nature's laws, those laws of whose government alone we have any knowledge or experi- The records of all nations afford innumerable instances of men deceiving others either from vanity or interest, or themselves being deceived by the limitedness of their views and their ignorance of natural causes: but where is the accredited case of God having conie upon earth, to give the lie to bis own creations? There would be something truly wonderful in the appearance of a ghost; but the assertion of a child that he saw one as he passed through the church-yard, is univers.illy admitted to be less miraculous. But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before our eyes, and on this fact rest his ence. a Sec Ilumc's Essay, vol. ii. page 121.

·154 NOTES claim to being considered the son of God;--the Humane Society restores drowned persons, and because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for the sons of God. All that we bave a right to infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not know it: had the Mexi. cans attended to this simple rule wben they heard the caunon of the Spaniards, they would not have considered them as gods: the experiments of modern chemistry would have defied the wisest pbilosopbers of ancient Greece and Rome to have accounted for them on natural principles. An author of strong common sense bas observed, that “a miracle is no miracle at second-hand;" he might have added, that a miracle is no miracle in any case; for until we are acquainted with all natural causcs, we have no reason to imagine others. There remains to be considered another proof of Christianity--Prophecy. A book is written before a certain event, in which this event is foretold; how could the prophet have foreknown it without inspiration? how could be liave been inspired without God? The greatest stress is laid on the prophecies of Moses and Hosea on the dispersion of the Jews, and that of Isaiah coucerning the coming of the Messiah: The prophecy of Moses is a collection of every possible cursing and blessing; and it is so far from being marvellous that the one of dispersiou should have been fulfilled, that it would have been more surprisiog if, out of all these, none should bave taken effect. In Deuteronomy, chap. xxviii. ver. 64, where Moses explicitly ·NOTES. 155 foretells the dispersion, he states that they shall there serve gods of wood and stone: “ And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other, and there thou shall serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, cven gods of wood and stone.” The Jews are at this day reniarkably tenacious of their religion. Moses also declares that they shall be subjected to these eauses for disobedience to his ritual: “And it shall come to pass, if thou will not hcarken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all the commandments and statutes which I command you this day, that all these curses shall come upon thee an? overtake thee." Is this the real reason? The thirı!, fourth and fifth chapters of Hosea are a piece of immodest confession. The indelicate type mnight apply in a hundred senses to a hundred things. The fifty.third chapter of Isaiah is more explicit, yet it does not exceed in cleargess tbe oracles of Delphos. The historical proof, that Moses, Isaiah and Hosea did write when they are said to have written, is far froin being clear and circumstantial. But prophecy requires proof in its character as a miracle; we have no right to suppose that a man foreknew future events from God, nutil it is demonstrated that he neither could know them by his own exertions, nor that the writings which contain the prediction could possibly bave been fabricated after the event pretended to be foretold. It is more probable that writings, pretending to divine inspiration, should have been fabricated after the fulllment of their pretended prediction, ·156 NOTES than that they should have really been divinely inspired; wben we consider that the latter supposition makes God at once the creator of the human mind and ignorant of its primary powers, particularly as we have numberless instances of false religions, and forged prophesies of things long past, and no accredited case of God having conversed with men directly or indirectly. It is also possible that the description of an event might have foregone its occurrence; but this is far from being a legitimate proof of a divine revelation, as many men, not pretending to the character of a prophet, have nevertheless, in this se'nse, prophesied. Lord Chesterfield was never yet taken for a prophet, even by a bishop, yet he uttered this remarkable prediction: “The despotic government of France is screwed up to the bighest pitch; a revolution is fast approaching; that revolution, I am conviuced, will be radical and sanguinary.” This appeared in the letters of the prophet long before the accomplishment of this wonderful prediction. Now, have these particulars come to pass, or have they not? If they have, how could the Earl have foreknown them without inspiration? If we admit the truth of the Christian religion on testimony such as this, we must aduit, on the same strength of evidence, that God has allixed the highest rewards to belief, and the eternal tortures of the rever-dying worm to disbelief; both of which have been demonstrated to be involuntary. The last proof of the Christian religion depends on the influence of the Holy Ghost. Theologians divide the influence of the Holy Ghost into its ordinary and ·NOTES. 157 extraordinary modes of operation. 'The latter is supposed to be that which inspired the Prophets and Apostles; and the former to be the grace of God, wbieh summarily makes known the truth of his revelation, to those wbose mind is fitted for its reception by a submissive perusal of his word. Persous convinced in this manner, can do any thing but account for their conviction, describe the time at which it happened, or the manner in which it came upon them. It is supposed to enter the mind by other channels than those of the senses, and therefore professes to be superior to reason founded on their experience, Admitting, bowever, the usefulness or possibility of a divine revelation, unless we demolish the foundations of all human knowledge, it is requisite that our reason should previously demonstrate its genuineness; for, before we extinguish the steady ray of reason and common sense, it is fit that we should discover whether we cannot do without their assistance, whether or no there be any other which may suflice to guide us through the labyrinth of life": for, if a man is to be inspired upon all occasions, if be is to be sure of a thing because he is sure, if the ordinary operations of the spirit are not to be considered very extraordinary inodes of demonstration, if enthusiasm is to stirp the place of proof, and madness that of sanity, ail reasoning is superfluous. The Mahometau dies fighting for his prophet, the Indian immolates himself at the chariot-wheels of Brahma, the * See Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, book iv. chap. xix., on Enthusiasny.

·158 NOTES. Hottentot worships an insect, the Negro a bunch of feathers, the Mexican sacrifices human victims! Their degree of conviction must certainly be very strong: it cannot arise from conviction, it must from feelings, the reward of their prayers. If each of these should affirm, in opposition to the strongest possible arguments, that inspiration carried internal evidence, I fear their inspired brethren, the orthodox Missionaries, would be so uncharitable as to pronounce them obstinate. Miracles cannot be received as testimonies of a disputed fact, because all human testimony has ever been insufficient to establish the possibility of miracles. That which is incapable of proof itself, is no proof of any thing else. Prophecy has also been rejected by the test of reason. Those, then, who have been actually inspired, are the only true believers in the Christian religion. Mox pumine viso Virginei tumuere sinus, isnuptaque mater Arcano stupuit compleri viscera partu Auctorum paritura suum. Mortalia corda Artificem texere poli, latuitque sub uno Pectore, qui totum late complectitur orbem. Claudian, Carmen Paschale. a • Upon secing the Divinity, the Virgin's womb soon swelled, and the unmarried mother was amazed to find herself filled with a mysterious progeny, and that she was to bring forth to the world her own Crcator. A mortal frame veiled the Framer of the Ileavens, and he who embraces the wide surrounding circle of the world, lay himself concealed in the recesses of the womb.

·NOTES, 159 Does not so monstrons and disgusting an absurdity carry its own infamy and refutation with itseli? VIII. PAGE 79. Him, (still from hope tu hope the bliss pursuing. Which, from the exhaustless lore of human wral Dawns on the virtuous minde) the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness, gift With self-enshrined cternity, &c. Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid sensation, of either pain or pleasure, makes the time seem long, as the cominon phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our ideas. If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during oue minute, by the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces, would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed one in quantity. If, therefore, the human mind, by any future improvement of its sensibility, should become conscious of an infinite number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity. I do not hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man will ever be prolonged; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is indefinite. One man is stretched on the rack during twelve bours; another sleeps soundly in his bed: the difference of time perceived by these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that balf an hour has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his agony.

·160 NOTES, Thus, the life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dulness. The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize amid the lethargy of every day business; the other can slumber over the brightest moments of bis being, and is unable to remember the happiest hour of his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life than the tortoise. Dark flood of time! Roll as it listeth thecal measure not By months or moments thy ambiguous course. Another may stand by me on the brink And watch the bubble wbirled beyond his ken That pauses at my feet. The sense of love, The thirst for action, and the impassioned thought Prolong my being: if I wake no more, My life more actual living will contain T'han some grey veterans' of the world's cold school, Whose listless hours unprofitably roll, By one enthusiast feeling unredeemed.. See Godwin's Pol. Jus. vol. i. page 411;- and Condorcet, Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit llumain, Epoque ix.

·NOTES 161 VII. PAGE 79. No longer now Jle slays the lamb that looks him in the face. I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that of the universe of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable mystery. His generations either bad a beginning, or they had not. The weight of evidence in favour of each of these suppositions seems tolerably equal; and it is perfectly unimportant to the present argument which is assumed. The language spoken, however, by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event seems to have also been that it come great change in the climates of the earth, with which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon tbeir posterity the wrath of God, and the loss of everlasting life admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. Milton was so well aware of this, that he makes Raphael thus exhibit to Adam the consequence of his disobedience. Immediately a place Before his eyes appeared: sad, noisome, dark: A lazar-house it seem'd; wherein were laid 11

·162
NOTES.
Numbers of all diseased: all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsious, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, cholic pangs,
Dæmoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
. Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
And how many thousands more might not be added
to this frightful catalogue!
The story of Prometheus is one likewise which, al.
though universally admitted to be allegorical, has never
been satisfactorily explained. Prometheus stole fire
from heaven, and was chained for this crime to mount
Caucasus, where a vulture continually devoured his
liver, that grew to meet its hunger. Hesiod says, that,
before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt
from suffering; that they enjoyed a vigorous youth,
and that death, when at length it came, approached like
sleep, and gently closed their eyes. Again, so general
was this opinion, that Horace, a poet of the Augustan
age, writes
Audax omnia perpeti,
Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas;
Audax Iapeti genus
Ignem fraude mala gentibus intulit:
Post ignem ætherid domo

·NOTES, 163 Subductum, macieset nova febrium Terris incubuit cobors, Semotique prius tarda necessitas Letbi corripuit gradum“. How plain a language is spoken by all this. Prome. theus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedieut for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It consumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death. All vice arose from the ruin of healthful inpocence. Tyranny, superstition, commerce, and inequality, were then first known, when reason vainly attempted to guide the wanderings of exacerbated passion. I conclude this part of the subject with an extract from Mr. Newton's Defence of Vegetable Regimen, from whom k bave borrowed this interpretation of the fable of Proegnetheus. Making allowance for such transposition of the a Tlus, froin the sun's cthercal beanı When bold Prometheus stole ili' enlivening flame, Or fevers dire a ghasily brood, Till then unknown, th' unhappy fraud pursu'd; On earth. ticir horrors baleful sprcad, And the pale monarch of the dead, Till then slow-moving to his prey, Precipitately rapid swept lis way. Francis's llorace, Book i, Odc 3.

·164 NOTES. events of the allegory as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, which this portion of the ancient mythology was intended to transmit, the drift of the fable seems to be this:-Man at his creation was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth; that is, he was not formed to be a sickly suffering creature as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to sink by slow degrees into the bosom of bis parent earth without disease or pain. Prometheus first taught the use of animal food (primus bovem occidit Prometheusa) and of fire, with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of these inventions, were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the newly-formed creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them. Thirst, the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet,” (perbaps of all diet vitiated by culinary preparation,) ensued; water was resorted to, and man forfeited the inestimable gift of health wbich he had received from heaven: he became diseased, the. partaker of a precarious existence, and no longer descended slowly to his grave b.” But just disease to luxury succeeds, And every death its own avenger breeds; The fury passions from that blood began, And turned on man a fiercer savage-man. Man, and the animals whom he has infected with his • Prometheus first killed an ox. Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. vii. scct. 57. Return to nature. Cadell, 1811, ·NOTES, 165 society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence, or natural old age. But the domestic bog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog are, subject to an incredible variety of distempers; and, like the corrupters of their nature, have physicians wbo thrive upon their miseries. The supereminence of man is like Satan's, a supereminence of pain, and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event, that by enabling bim to communicate his sensutions, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one question :--How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits, and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being ?-I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would in a great measure capacitate us for the solutiou of this important question. It is true, that mental and bodily derangement is attributable in part to other deviations froin rectilude and nature than those wbich concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connection of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of uusatisfied celibacy, unenjoying prostitution, and the premature arrival of puberty necessarily spring; the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the exhalatious of chemical ·-166 NOTES. processes; the muflling of our bodies in superfluous apparel; the absurd treatment of infants:-- all these, and innumerable other causes, contribute their mite to the mass of human evil. Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in every thing, and carnivorous in nothing; he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. A Mandarin of the first class, with pails two inches long, would probably find them alone, inefficient to hold even a bare. After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the ox, and the ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion ; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his licad into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nåture formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent. Man resembles no carnivorous animal.. There is no exception, unless man be one, to the rule of herbivorous animals having cellulated colons.

·NOTES. 167 The orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth. The orang-outang is the most anthropomorphous of the ape tribe, all of wbich are strictly frugivorous. There is no other species of animals, which live on different food, in which this analogy exists* lo many frugivorous animals, the canine teeth are more pointed and distinct than those of man. The resemblance also of the human stomach to that of the orang-outang, is greater than to that of any other animal. The intestines are also identical with those of herbivorous animals, which present a larger surface for absorption and have ample and cellulated colons. The cæcum also, though short, is larger than that of carnivorous animals; and even here the orang-outang retains its accustomed similarity. The structure of the human frame then is that of one fitted to a pure vegetable diet, in every essential particular. It is true, that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour. A lamb, which was fed for some time on flesh by a ship's crew, refused its natural diet at the end of the voyage. There are numerous instances of horses, sheep, oxen, and even wood-pigeons, having been taught to live upon flesh, until they have loathed their natural alia Cuvier, Leçons d'Anat. Comp. tom. iji. pages 169, 373, 448, 463, 480. Recs's Cyclopædia, article Man.

·168 NOTES, ment. Young children evidently preſer pastry, oranges, apples, and other fruit, to the flesh of animals, until, by the gradual depravation of the digestive organs, the free use of vegetables bas for a time produced serious inconveniences; for a time, I say, since there never was an instance wherein a change from spirituous liquors and animal food to vegetables and pure water, bas failed ultimately to iqvigorate the body, by rendering its juices bland and consentaneous, and to restore to the mind that cheerfulness and elasticity, which not one in fifty possesses on the present system. A love of strong liquors is also with difficulty taught to infants. Almost every one remembers the wry faces which the first glass of port produced. Unsophisticated instinct is invariably unerring; but to decide on the fitness of animal food, from the perverted appetites which its constrained adoption produces, is to make the criminal a judge in his own cause: it is even worse, it is appealing to the infatuated drunkard in a question of the salubrity of brandy. What is the cause of morbid action in the animal system? Not the air we breathe, for our fellow denizens of nature breathe the same uniujured; not the water we drink, (if remote from the pollutions of man and his inventionsa,) for the animals drink it tov; not the earth we tread upon; not the unobscured sight of a The necessity of resorting to some means of purifying water, and the disease which arises from its adulteration in civilized countries, is sufficiently apparent.-See Dr. Lambe's Reports on Cancer. I do not assert that the use of water is in itself unnatural, but that the unperverted palate would "swallow no liquid capable of occasioning disease.

·NOTES. 169 glorious nature, in the wood, the field, or the expanse of sky and ocean; nothing that we are or do in common with the undiseased inhabitants of the forest. Sometbing then wherein we differ from them: our habit of altering our food by fire, so that onr appetite is no longer a just criterion for the fitness of its gratification. Except in children there remain no traces of that instinct which determines, in all other animals, what aliment is natural or otherwise; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge considerations drawn from comparative anatomy, to prove that we are naturally frugivorous. Crine is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of disease shall be discovered, the root, from which all vice and misery have so long overshadowed the globe, will lie bare to the axe. All the exertions of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sanie mind in a sane body resolves upon a real crime. It is a man of violent passions,.blood-shot eyes, and swollen vejos, that alone can grasp the knife of morder. The system of a simple diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families, and even individuals. In no cases has a return to vegetable diet produced the slightest injury; in most it bas ·170 NOTES. been' attended with changes undeniably beneficial. Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are not those mineral and vegetable poisons that have been introduced for its extirpation! How many thousands have become murderers and robbers, bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors; who had they slaked their thirst only with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their own unperverted feelings. How many groundless opinious and absurd institutions have not received a general sanction from the sottishness and intemperance of iudividuals! Who will assert that, had the populace of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a set of men, whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli, look with coolness on an uuto da fe? Is it to be believed tbat a being of gentle feelings, rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood ? Was Nero a man of temperate life? Could you read calm health in bis cheek, flushed with ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human race? Did Muley Ismael's pulse beat evenly, was his skin transparent, did his eyes beam with healthfulness, and its invariable concomitants, cheerfulness and benignity? Though history has decided none of these ·NOTES. 171 questions, a child could not hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused cheek of Buonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless inquietude of his nervous system, speak no less plainly the character of his upresting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders, that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons. The desire of lyranny could scarcely be excited in the individual, the power to tyrannize would certaiuly not be delegated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation, nor rendered impotent and irrational by discase. Pregnant indeed with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical nature; arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the multitudinous sources of disease in civilized life. Even common water, that apparently innoxious pabulum, when corrupted by the filth of populous cities, is a deadly and insidious destroyer*, Wbo can wonder that all tbe inducements held out by God himself in the Bible to virtue should have becn vainer than a nurse's tale; and that those dogmas, by wbich he has there excited and justified the most ferocious propensities, should have alone been deemed essential; whilst Christians are in the daily practice of all those babits which have infected with disease and crime, not only the reprobate sons, but these favoured cbildren of the common Father's love. Omoia Lainbe's Reports on Cancer.

·172 NOTES. potence itself could not save them from the consequences of this original and universal sin. There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness; madness, in all its bideous variety, from the ravings of the feltered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill temper, that make a hell of domestic liſe, into a calm and considerate everness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society. On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady; the term of our existence would be protracted; we should enjoy life, and no looger preclude others from the enjoymeat of it; all sensational delights would be infiuitely more exquisite and perfect; the very sense of being would then be a continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few aud favoured moments of our youth. By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject whose merits an experience of six months would set for ever at rest. But it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar ·NOTES. 173 of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded, that when the benefits of vegetable diet are mathematically proved ; when it is as clear, that those who live naturally are exempt from premature death, as that nine is not oue, the most sottish of mankind will feel a preference towards a long and tranquil, contrasted with a short and painful life. On the average, out of sixty persons, four die in three years, Hopes are entertained that in April 1814, a statement will be given that sixty persons, all having lived more than three years on veyetables and pure water, are then in perfect health. More than two years have now elapsed; not one of them has died; no such example will be found in any sixty persons taken at random. Seventeen persons of all ages (the families of Dr. Lambe and Mr. Newton) have lived for seven years on this diet without a death, and almost without the slightest illness. Surely, when we consider that some of these were infants, and one a martyr to asthma now nearly subdued, we may challenge any seventeen persons taken at random in this city to exhibit a parallel case. Those who may have been excited to question the rectitude of established habits of diet, by these loose remarks, should consult Mr. Newton's luminous and eloquent essaya. When these proofs come fairly before the world, and are clearly seen by all who understand arithmetic, it is scarcely possible that abstinence from aliments demonstrably pernicious should not become universal. Return to Nature, or Defence of Vegetable Regimen. Cadell, 1811.

·174 NOTES. In proportion to the number of proselytes, so will be the weight of evidence; and when a thousand persons can be produced, living on vegetables and distilled water, who have to dread no disease but old age, the world will be compelled to regard animal flesh and fermented liquors as slow but certain poisons. The change which would be produced by simpler habits on political economy, is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouriug an acre at a meal, and many loaves of bread would cease to contribute to gont, madness, and apoplexy, in the shape ‘of a pint of porter, or a dram of gin, when appeasing the long-protracted famine of the bard-working peasant's hungry babes. The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. • It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesb, and they pay for the greater licence of the privilege, by subjectiou to supernumerary diseases. Again, the spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform, would insensibly become agricultural; commerce, with all its vice, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive ·NOTES. 175 complication of political relations would be so far simplified, that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare. How would England, for example, depend on the caprices of foreign rulers, if she contained within herself all the necessaries, and despised wbatever they possessed of the luxuries of life? How could they starve her into compliance with their views? Of wbat consequence would it be that they refused to take her woollen manufactures, when large and fertile tracts of the island ceased to be allotted to the waste of pasturage? On a natural system of diet, we should require no spices from India; no wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira; none of those multitudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the causes of so much individual rivalship, such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes. In the bistory of modern times, the avarice of commercial monopoly, no less than the ambition of weak and wicked chiefs, seems to have fomented the universal discord, to have added stubbornness to the mistakes of cabinets, and indocility to the infatuation of the people. Let it ever be remembered, that it is the direct influence of commerce to make the interval between the richest and the poorest man, wider and more unconquerable. Let it be remembered, that it is a foe to every thing of real worth and excelleuce in the human character. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth, is built upon the ruins of all that is good in cbivalry or repnblicanism; and luxury is the foreruuner of a barbarism ·176 NOTES. scarce capable of cure. Is it impossible to realize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the production of his solid happiness ? Certainly, if this advantage (the object of all political speculation) be in any degree attainable, it is attainable only by a community, which holds out no facti. tious incentives to the avarice and ambition of the few, and wbich is internally organized for the liberty, security, and comfort of the many. None must be entrusted with power (and money is the completest species of power) who do not stand pledged to use it exclusively for the general benefit. But the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors, directly militates with this equality of the rights of man. The peasant cannot gratify these fashionable cravings without leaving his family to starve. Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of population, pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded. The labour requisite to support a family is far lighter than is usually supposed. The peasautry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, and the manufacturers. The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than that of any other. It strikes at the root of the evil. To remedy the abuses of legislation, bea It has come under the author's experience, that some of the workmen on an embankment in North Wales, who, in consequence of the inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight. In the notes to Pratt's Poem, “ Bread, or the Poor," is an account of an industrious labourer, who, by working in a small garden, before and after his day's task, attained to an enviable state of independence.

·NOTES. 177 fore we annihilate the propensities by which they are produced, is to suppose, that by taking away the effect, the cause will cease to operate. But the efficacy of this system depends entirely on the proselytism of individuals, and grounds its merits, as a benefit to the community, upon the total change of the dietetic habits in its members. It proceeds securely from a number of particular cases to one that is universal, and has this advantage over the contrary mode, that one error does not invalidate all that has gone before. Let not too much, however, be expected from this system. The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived, is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been, bad not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking rout in the silence of innumerable ages ? - Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually pe. risbes, for want of its accustomed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water. Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a fair trial, should in the 12 ·178 NOTES. first place, date the commencement of their practice, from the moment of their conviction. All depends upon breaking through a pernicious habit resolutely, and at once. Dr. Trottere asserts, that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually relinquishing his dram. Animal flesh, in its effects on the human stomach, is analagous to a dram. It is similar to the kind, though differing in the degree, of its operation. The proselyte to a pure diet must be warned to expect a temporary diminution of muscular strength. The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable capability for exertion, far surpassing his former various and fluctuatiog strength. Above all, he will acquire an easiness of breathing, by which such exertion is performed, with a remarkable exemption from that painful and difficult pauting now felt by almost every one, after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain. He will be equally capable of bodily exertion, or mental application, after as before his simple meal. He will feel none of the barcotic effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be dreaded than death itself. He will escape the epidemic maduess, which broods over its own injurious . See Trutter on the Nervous Temperament.

·NOTES. 179 notions of the Deity, and "realizes the hell that priests and beldams feign.” Every man forms as it were his god from bis own character; to the divinity of one of simple habits, no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness of his creatures. He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others for the love of God. He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to be a system of perfect epicurism. He will no longer be incessantly occupied in blunting and destroying those organs from which he expects his gratification. The pleasures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, lettuces, with a dessert of apples, gooseberries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, and, in winter, oranges, 'apples, and pears, is far greater than is supposed. Those who wait until they can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appetite will scarcely join with the hypocrital sensualist at a lord-mayor's feast, who declaims against the pleasures of the table. Solomon kept a thousand concubines, and owned in despair that all was vanity. The man wbose happiness is constituted by the society of one amiable woman, would fud sone difficulty in syin papathizing with the disappointmeut of this venerable debauchee. I address myself, not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turued poison into fooi, he will hate the brutal plea- ·180 NOTES. sures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathjes, should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals. The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is alflicted with a variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change, produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the causes of incurable unhappiness, would on this diet experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual health and natural playfulnessä. The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases, that it is dangerous to palliate and impossible to cure by medicine. How much longer will man contipue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe? a See Mr. Newton's book. His children are the most beautiful and healthy crcatures it is possible to conceive; the girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating ; the judicions treatment which they experience in other points, may be a correlative cause of this. In the first five years of thtir life, of 18,000 children that are born, 7,500 die of various diseases; and how many more of those that survive are rendered miserable by maladies not immediately mortal? The quality and quantity of a woman's milk are materially in. jured by the use of dead Aesh. In an island, near Iceland, where na vegetables are to be got, the children invariably die of tetanus, before they are three weeks old, and the population is supplied from the main land.-- Ştr G. Mackenzie's Hist. of Icelund. See also Emile, chap. i. p. 53, 54, 56.

·NOTES, 181 "Αλλά δράκονίας αξίας καλείται και παρδάλεις και λέλας, αυτοί δε μιαιφονείτε εις ωμότητα καταλιπόντες εκείνους αδέν. Εκείνοις μεν γάρ ο φόνος τροφή, υμίν δε όψον εστίν. “Οτι γαρ εκ έστιν ανθρώπων κατά φύσιν το σαρκοφg[είν πρώτον μεν από των σωμάτων δηλάται της κατασκευής. Ουδενί γας έoικε το ανθρώπα σώμα των επί σαρκοφαγία γεγονότων, και γρυπότης χείλες, ουκ οξύτης όνυχος, ο τραχύτης οδόντων προσιστιν, εκοιλίας εντονία, και πνεύματος θερμότης, τρέψαι και κατεργάζασθαι δυνατή το βαρύ και κρεώδες. 'Αλλ' αυτόθεν η φύσις τη λειότητι των οδόντων, και τη σμικρότητι τα στόματος, και τη μαλακότητα της γλώσσης, και τη προς πέψιν αμβλύτητι τα πνέυματος, εξόμνυται την σαρκοφαγίαν. Ει δε λεγείς πεφυκέναι σεαυτόν επί τοιαύτην έδώδην, ό Βέλει φαγείν, πρώτον αυτος απόκτεινον· αλλ' αυτός, δια σεαυτέ μη χρησάμενος κοπίδη, μηδε τυσανω μηδέ πελέκει, αλλά ως λύκοι, και άρκτοι, και λεόνες αυτοι ως έσθίεσι φονευέσιν, άνελε δήγματι βεν, ή σώματι σύν, ή άρνα ή λαγωον διάρρηξoν, και φάγε προσπεσών έτι ζώντος ως εκείνα. "Ημείς δε έτως εν τω μιαιφόνω τρυφώμεν, ώστε όψιν το κρέας προσαγορεύομεν, είτα όψων προς αυτό το κρέας δ'ημεθα, αναμιγνύν τις έλαιον, οίνον, μέλι, γάρον, άξος, ηδύσμασι Συριακούς, 'Αραβικούς, ώσπερ όντως νεκρός ενταφιάζοντες. Και γαρ άτως αυτων διαλυθεντων και μαλαχθέντων και τρόπον τινα κρεοσαπέντων έργον εστι την πέψιν κρατήσαι και διακρατηθείσης δε δεινάς Βαρύτητας και νοσώδεις απεψίας. Ούτω το πρώτον άγριον τι ζώον έβρώθη και κακώργον, είτα όρνις τις ή ιχθύς είλκυστο» και γεύομενον έτω και προμελετήσαν εν εκείνους το νικών, επι βBν εργάτης ήλθε, και το κοσμαν πρόβατον, και τον οίκωρου άλεκτρονα και κατα μικρόν έτω την απληστιών τονώσαντες, έπι σφαγάς ανθρωπων, και φονες και πολέμως προήλθον *. Πλουτ, περί της σαρκοφαγίας. & You apply the term wild to lions, panthers, and serpents, yet in your ·182 NOTES. own savage slaughters, you far surpass them in ferocity, for the blood shed by them is a matter of necessity, and requisite for their subsistence, That man is not by nature destined to devour animal fuod, is evident from the construction of the human frane, which bears no resenublance to wild beasts, or birds of prey. Man is not provided with claws or talons, with sharpness of fang, or tusk, so well adapted to tear and lacerate; nur is his stomach so well braced and unuscular, nor his animal spirits so wasm as to enable him to digest this solid mass of animal flesh. On the contrary, nature has made his teeth smooth, his mouth narrow, and his tongue soft; and has contrived, by the slowness of his digestion, to divert hiin from devouring a specics of food so ill adapted to his frame and constitution. But if you still maintain, that such is your natural mode of subsistence, then follow nature in your mode of killing your prey, and em. ploy neither knifc, haiomer, or hatchet, but like wolves, bears, and lions, seize an ox with your teeth, grasp a boar round the body, or trar asunder a lamb or a hare, and like the savage tribe, devour them still panting in the agonies of death. * 1 We carry our luxury still farther, by the varicty of sauces and scasunings which we add to our beastly banquets, mixing together oil, wine, honey, pickles, vinegar, and Syrian and Arabian vintnients and perfumes, as if we intended to bury and cinbalm thc carcases on which we fud. The difficulty of digesting such a wass of matter reduced in our stomaclis to a state of liquefaction and putrefaction, is the source of endless disorders in the human framc. First of all, the wild mischicvous aninals were selected for food, and then the birds and fishes were dragged to slaughter ; next the human appetite directed itself against the laborious ox, the use ful and fleece-bearing sheep, and the cock, the guardian of thic house. At last, by this porc paratory discipline, mau becanie niatured for human massacies, slaughtais, and wars. THE END. Printed and Published by W. Claik, 201, Strand, T. M.

·TO
HARRIET *****
W110se is the love that gleaming through the
world,
Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn ?
Whose is the warm and partial praise,
Virtue's most sweet reward ?
?
Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul
Ripep in truth and virtuous daring grow
Whose eyes lave I gazed fondly on,
And loved inankind the more?
HARRIET! on thine:--thou wast my purer
mind;
Thou wast the inspiration of my song';
Thine are these early winding flowers,
Though garlanded by me.

·TO HARRIL.T.
Then press unto thy breast this pledge of love,
And know, though time may change, and years
may roll,
Each floweret gathered in my heart
It consecrates to tbne.

·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.

·No text on this page.