Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. III. The Eighteenth Century: Addison to Blake

Mark Akenside (1721–1770)

Extract from The Pleasures of Imagination

SAY, why was man so eminently raised

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 ascent

Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,—

The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns

In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope

That breathes from day to day sublimer things,

And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind

With such resistless ardour to embrace

Majestic forms, impatient to be free;

Spurning the gross control of wilful might;

Proud of the strong contention of her toils;

Proud to be daring? Who but rather turns

To heaven’s broad fire his unconstrained view

Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?

Who that from Alpine heights his labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade,

And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

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 vollied 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 round the sun,

Beholds him pouring the redundant stream

Of light, beholds his 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, measures 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 arrives in sight of mortal things.

Even on the barriers of the world untired

She meditates the eternal depth below;

Till, half recoiling, down the headlong steep

She plunges; soon o’erwhelmed and swallowed up

In that immense of being. There her hopes

Rest at the fated goal. For, from the birth

Of mortal man, the sovran Maker said,

That not in humble nor in brief delight,

Not in the fading echoes of renown,

Power’s purple robes, nor Pleasure’s flowery lap,

The soul should find enjoyment; but, from these

Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,

Till every bound at length should disappear,

And infinite perfection close the scene.