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From “Night Thoughts,” Night I.
THE BELL strikes one: we take no note of time, | |
| But from its loss. To give it, then, a tongue, | |
| Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, | |
| I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, | |
| It is the knell of my departed hours: | 5 |
| Where are they? With the years beyond the flood. | |
| It is the signal that demands despatch; | |
| How much is to be done! my hopes and fears | |
| Start up alarmed, and o’er life’s narrow verge | |
| Look down—on what? a fathomless abyss; | 10 |
| A dread eternity; how surely mine! | |
| And can eternity belong to me, | |
| Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour? * * * * * | |
| Time the supreme!—Time is eternity; | |
| Pregnant with all eternity can give; | 15 |
| Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile. | |
| Who murders time, he crushes in the birth | |
| A power ethereal, only not adored. | |
| Ah! how unjust to Nature and himself, | |
| Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man! | 20 |
| Like children babbling nonsense in their sports, | |
| We censure Nature for a span too short; | |
| That span too short, we tax as tedious too; | |
| Torture invention, all expedients tire, | |
| To lash the lingering moments into speed, | 25 |
| And whirl us (happy riddance!) from ourselves. | |
| Art, brainless Art! our furious charioteer | |
| (For Nature’s voice, unstifled, would recall), | |
| Drives headlong towards the precipice of death! | |
| Death, most our dread; death, thus more dreadful made: | 30 |
| O, what a riddle of absurdity! | |
| Leisure is pain; takes off our chariot wheels: | |
| How heavily we drag the load of life! | |
| Blest leisure is our curse: like that of Cain, | |
| It makes us wander; wander earth around | 35 |
| To fly that tyrant, Thought. As Atlas groaned | |
| The world beneath, we groan beneath an hour. | |
| We cry for mercy to the next amusement: | |
| The next amusement mortgages our fields; | |
| Slight inconvenience! prisons hardly frown, | 40 |
| From hateful Time if prisons set us free. | |
| Yet when Death kindly tenders us relief, | |
| We call him cruel; years to moments shrink, | |
| Ages to years. The telescope is turned. | |
| To man’s false optics (from his folly false) | 45 |
| Time, in advance, behind him hides his wings, | |
| And seems to creep, decrepit with his age; | |
| Behold him when past by: what then is seen | |
| But his broad pinions, swifter than the winds? | |
| And all mankind, in contradiction strong, | 50 |
| Rueful, aghast, cry out on his career. | |
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