ACQUAINT thyself with God, if thou wouldst taste
His works. Admitted once to His embrace,
Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before;
Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heart,
Made pure, shall relish, with Divine delight
Till then unfelt, what hands Divine have wrought.
Brutes graze the mountain-top, with faces prone
And eyes intent upon the scanty herb

It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow,
Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread

Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away

From inland regions to the distant main.

Man views it, and admires; but rests content

With what he views. The landscape has his praise,

But not its Author. Unconcerned who formed

The paradise he sees, he finds it such,

And, such well-pleased to find it, asks no more.

Not so the mind that has been touched from Heaven,

And in the school of sacred wisdom taught

To read His wonders, in whose thought the world,
Fair as it is, existed ere it was.

Not for its own sake merely, but for His

Much more who fashioned it, he gives it praise ;
Praise that, from earth resulting, as it ought,
To earth's acknowledged sovereign, finds at once
Its only just proprietor in Him.

The soul that sees Him or receives sublimed
New faculties, or learns at least to employ
More worthily the powers she owned before,
Discerns in all things what, with stupid gaze
Of ignorance, till then she overlooked,
A ray of heavenly light, gilding all forms.
Terrestrial in the vast and the minute;
The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing,

And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.
Much conversant with Heaven, she often holds
With those fair ministers of light to man,

That fill the skies nightly with silent pomp,

Sweet conference. Inquires what strains were they With which Heaven rang, when every star, in haste

To gratulate the new-created earth,

Sent forth a voice, and all the sons of God

CONCLUSION.

Shouted for joy. "Tell me, ye shining hosts,
That navigate a sea that knows no storms,
Beneath a vault unsullied with a cloud,

If from your elevation, whence ye view
Distinctly scenes invisible to man,

And systems, of whose birth no tidings yet
Have reached this nether world, ye spy a race
Favoured as ours; transgressors from the womb,
And hasting to a grave, yet doomed to rise,
And to possess a brighter heaven than yours?
As one who long detained on foreign shores
Pants to return, and when he sees afar

His country's weather-bleached and battered rocks,
From the green wave emerging, darts an eye
Radiant with joy towards the happy land;
So I with animated hopes behold,

And many an aching wish, your beamy fires,
That show like beacons in the blue abyss,
Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home

From toilsome life to never-ending rest.

Love kindles as I gaze. I feel desires

That give assurance of their own success,

And that, infused from Heaven, must thither tend."
So reads he Nature, whom the lamp of truth
Illuminates. Thy lamp, mysterious Word!
Which whoso sees no longer wanders lost,

FF

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