Amid the vast creation; why ordained

Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,

With thoughts beyond the limits of his frame,

But that the Omnipotent might send him forth

In sight of mortal and immortal powers,

As on a boundless theatre to run The great career of justice; to exalt His generous aim to all diviner deeds;

To chase each partial purpose from his breast;

And through the mists of passion and of sense,

And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,

To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice

Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul

Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing

Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth

And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft,

Through fields of air pursues the flying storm;

Rides on the volleyed lightning through the heavens;

Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,

Sweeps the long track of day. Then high she soars

The blue profound, and hovering o'er the sun

Beholds him pouring the redundant

stream

Of light: beholds the unrelenting sway

Bend the reluctant planets to absolve The fated rounds of time. Thence far effused

She darts her swiftness up the long

career

Of devious comets; through its burning signs

Exulting circles the perennial wheel Of nature, and looks back on all the

stars,

Whose blended light, as with a milky

zone,

Invests the orient. Now amazed she

views

The empyreal waste, where happy

spirits hold,

Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;

And fields of radiance, whose unfading light

Has travelled the profound six thousand years,

Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things.

Nature's care, to all her children

just,

With richer treasures and an ampler

state,

Endows at large whatever happy man Will deign to use them. His the

ULYSSES.

IT little profits that an idle king By this still hearth. among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it

were

For some three suns to store and

hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking

star

Of joy in widest commonalty spread; Of the individual Mind that keeps her own

Inviolate retirement, subject there To Conscience only, and the law supreme

Of that Intelligence which governs all

I sing:"fit audience let me find, though few!"

So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the Bard

In holiest mood. Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such

Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink

Deep, and, aloft ascending, breathe

Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly uni

verse

In love and holy passion, shall find these

A simple produce of the common day.

I, long before the blissful hour arrives,

Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse

Of this great consummation: - and, by words

Which speak of nothing more than what we are,

Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep

Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain

To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers, perhaps no less,

Of the whole species) to the external World