| |
| LET 1 martial souls, whom wild ambition warms, | |
| The trumpet’s clangor, and rude din of arms, | |
| Point out the path victorious heroes trod, | |
| The pest of nations, and the scourge of God: | |
| Mine be the task, in humbler verse to trace | 5 |
| The real greatness of the human race. | |
| Though rude and savage Afric’s sons we find, | |
| Yet there first science dawn’d upon mankind, | |
| There curb’d the passions in perpetual strife, | |
| And there begat the softer arts of life. | 10 |
| Blest by kind nature with a generous soil, | |
| That yielded herbage, though not dress’d with toil, | |
| In philosophic ease they pass’d their years, | |
| And watch’d the motions of the rolling spheres. | |
| Their modest wants plain nature could redress, | 15 |
| And science gave them rural happiness. | |
| Egypt beheld her twilight’s fainter ray, | |
| And form’d fond hopes of her meridian day; | |
| When, lo! tyrannic rage usurp’d the whole, | |
| And cramp’d with fetters each high swelling soul. | 20 |
| Disorder’d fancy superstition bred; | |
| She clapp’d her wings, and thought her foe was dead; | |
| Yet she but fled, to gain in happy Greece, | |
| What Egypt had denied her—rural peace. | |
| The Grecian souls, form’d of the subtlest kind, | 25 |
| In freedom nurtured, strengthen’d and refined, | |
| Quick catch’d the flame; it ran from soul to soul, | |
| And like electric fire, inspired the whole. | |
| Here poets sang, and rhetoricians plead, | |
| Here statesmen sat, and patriot worthies bled. | 30 |
| Ah blindness to the future! headlong toss’d, | |
| They grasp’d the shadow, but the substance lost. | |
| Greece led her armies Troy’s high walls to raze; | |
| The city shook and tottered to its base, | |
| At length it fell—but from its ruins rose | 35 |
| A vagrant band to subjugate their foes. | |
| Imperial Rome, the mistress of the world, | |
| Towns, cities, kingdoms into ruin hurl’d, | |
| And reign’d supreme alone. Greece felt her force, | |
| Nor stemm’d the torrent in its rapid course; | 40 |
| All victims fell to its resistless rage, | |
| The rough Barbarian, and the Grecian sage. | |
| Ardent the Romans Grecian science view’d, | |
| Nor scorn’d to learn of those they had subdued; | |
| They reach’d the same sublimity of thought, | 45 |
| And those, who learned, equall’d those, who taught. | |
| There godlike Homer rear’d his awful head, | |
| Here Virgil sang, and here great Tully plead. | |
| As when some mighty torrent, swoln with rain, | |
| Falls rushing, dashing, till it meets the plain, | 50 |
| O’er craggy rocks bends its resistless force, | |
| From clift to clift loud thundering in its course; | |
| So did the Athenian patriotic rave, | |
| And taught his country to be nobly brave. | |
| Not so the Roman. As the ancient Nile | 55 |
| Glides smoothly on within its banks a while: | |
| Slow, gradual, rising, then o’erspreads the plain, | |
| And adds all Egypt to the swelling main; | |
| So syren Tully onward gently rolls, | |
| Enchants, enraptures, and subdues our souls. | 60 |
| Behold far north the gathering tempest rise, | |
| Rushing impetuous, as the whirlwind flies; | |
| Towns, cities, kingdoms from their basis fall, | |
| And one wide ruin overwhelms them all. | |
| Eternal Rome sinks to the common grave, | 65 |
| Bursts, like a bubble dancing on the wave, | |
| Flies off in smoke, and rules the world no more— | |
| Oh! blush then, earthly grandeur! pageant power. | |
| Age after age in one sad tenor ran, | |
| A blank—a chasm in the page of man. | 70 |
| Men drudged their labor’d dulness to rehearse, | |
| To form an anagram, or egg in verse; | |
| They stifled genius with pedantic rules, | |
| And labor’d hard to prove that——they were fools. | |
| No mighty task, though labor’d in so long, | 75 |
| Each line was proof, was demonstration strong; | |
| And men, Oh dulness to perfection brought! | |
| Blush’d to be guilty of a noble thought. | |
| Yet in this gloom did Roger Bacon rise, | |
| Like lightning flashing through the clouded skies, | 80 |
| He burst the barrier of pedantic rules, | |
| And all the labor’d jargon of the schools. | |
| As forked lightnings, with their hasty light, | |
| Serve but to show the horrors of the night; | |
| So he but show’d the dulness of the age, | 85 |
| A stain—a blot upon th’ historic page. | |
| As when cold Zembla, wrapt in darkest shade, | |
| First sees the sun erect his radiant head, | |
| In gratitude to the benignant power, | |
| They gather round and Persian-like adore; | 90 |
| He gives them light, not only light, but heat; | |
| Warms with new life, and makes that life complete. | |
| The expanding blossoms smile on every clod, | |
| And laughing valleys own the present God; | |
| Loud hymns of praise the feather’d tribes employ, | 95 |
| And savage beasts howl their tremendous joy. | |
