FROM NIGHT THOUGHTS," NIGHT I.
THE bell strikes one: we take no note of time,
To give it, then, a tongue,
As if an angel spoke,
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours:
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;
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;
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!
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,
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:
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
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,
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)
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,
Rueful, aghast, cry out on his career.
TO-MORROW's action! can that hoary wisdom,
Borne down with years, still doat upon to-morrow!
The fatal mistress of the young, the lazy,
The coward and the fool, condemned to lose
An useless life in waiting for to-morrow,
To gaze with longing eyes upon to-morrow,
Till interposing death destroys the prospect.
Strange that this general fraud from day to day
Should fill the world with wretches, undetected!
The soldier, laboring through a winter's march,
Still sees to-morrow drest in robes of triumph;
Still to the lover's long-expecting arms
To-morrow brings the visionary bride.
But thou, too old to bear another cheat,
Learn that the present hour alone is man's.
So much to do: so little done!
Ah! yesternight I saw the sun
Sink beamless down the vaulted gray,-
The ghastly ghost of YESTERDAY.
So little done so much to do!
Each morning breaks on conflicts new;
But eager, brave, I'll join the fray,
And fight the battle of TO-DAY.
So much to do: so little done!
But when it's o'er, the victory won,-
Oh! then, my soul, this strife and sorrow
Will end in that great, glad TO-MORROW.
JAMES ROBERTS GILMORE.
FROM "NIGHT THOUGHTS," NIGHT I.
BE wise to-day; 't is madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent, would not this be strange?
That 't is so frequent, this is stranger still.
Of man's miraculous mistakes this bear's
The palm, "That all men are about to live,"
Forever on the brink of being born.
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They one day shall not drivel: and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;
At least, their own; their future selves applaud :
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead !
Time lodged in their own hands is folly's veils ;
That lodged in Fate's, to wisdom they consign;
The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone :
"T is not in folly not to scorn a fool,
And scarce in human wisdom to do more.
All promise is poor dilatory man,
And that through every stage. When young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish,
As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise,
At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty, chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought,
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.
And why? Because he thinks himself immortal. All men think all men mortal but themselves; Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, Soon close; where passed the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wing no scar the sky retains,
The parted wave no furrow from the keel,
So dies in human hearts the thought of death:
Even with the tender tears which Nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.
FAREWELL, my Youth! for now we needs must part, For here the paths divide;
|