The Fairy and the Spirit
Entered the Hall of Spells :
Those golden clouds

That rolled in glittering billows
Beneath the azure canopy

With the ethereal footsteps, trembled not:
The light and crimson mists,
Floating to strains of thrilling melody
Through that unearthly dwelling,
Yielded to every movement of the will.
Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned,
And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,
Used not the glorious privilege

Of virtue and of wisdom.

Spirit the Fairy said,

And pointed to the gorgeous dome,
This is a wondrous sight

And mocks all human grandeur;

But, were it virtue's only meed, to dwell
In a celestial palace, all resigned
To pleasurable impulses, immured
Within the prison of itself, the will

Of changeless nature would be unfulfilled.
Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come !
This is thine high reward :-the past shall rise;
Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach
The secrets of the future.

The Fairy and the Spirit

Approached the overhanging battlement.-
Below lay stretched the universe!
There, far as the remotest line
That bounds imagination's flight,
Countless and unending orbs
In mazy motion intermingled,
Yet still fulfilled immutably
Eternal nature's law.
Above, below, around
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony:
Each with undeviating aim,

In eloquent silence, through the depths of space
Pursued its wondrous way.

There was a little light

That twinkled in the misty distance :

None but a spirit's eye,

Might ken that rolling orb ;

None but a spirit's eye,

And in no other place

But that celestial dwelling, might behold
Each action of this earth's inhabitants.
But matter pace, end time

In those aeil mansions cease to act";'
And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps
The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds
Those obstacles, of which an earthly soul
Fears to attempt the conquest.

The Fairy pointed to the earth.
The Spirit's intellectual eye
Its kindred beings recognised.

The thronging thousands, to a passing view,
Seemed like an anthill's citizens.

How wonderful! that even

The passions, prejudices, interests.

That sway the meanest being, the weak touch
That moves the finest nerve,

And in one human brain

Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link
In the great chain of nature.

Behold, the Fairy cried.
Palmyra's ruined palaces !—

Behold! where grandeur frowned;
Behold! where pleasure smiled;
What now remains ?-the memory
Of senselessness and shame-
What is immortal there?
Nothing-it stands to tell
A melancholy tale to give
An awful warning soon
Oblivion will steal silently

The remnant of its fame.

Monarchs and conquerors there Proud o'er prostrate millions trodThe earthquakes of the human race; Like them, forgotten when the ruin That marks their shock is past.

Beside the eternal Nile,
The Pyramids have risen,

Nile shall pursue his changeless way :
Those pyramids shall fall;

Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell
The spot whereon they stood;
Their very site shall be forgotten,
As is their builder's name !

Behold yon sterile spot;

Where now the wandering Arab's tent
Flaps in the desert blast.

There once old Salem's haughty fane

Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes, And in the blushing face of day

Exposed its shameful glory.

Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed

The building of that fane; and many a father,

Worn out with toil and slavery, implored

The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth,
And spare his children the detested task
Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning
The choicest days of life,

To soothe a dotard's vanity.

There an inhuman and uncultured race
Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God;
They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb

The unborn child-old age and infancy
Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms

Left not soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends :
But what was he who taught them that the God
Of nature and benevolence had given

A special sanction to the trade of blood?
His name and theirs are fading, and the tales
Of this barbarian nation, which imposture
Recites till terror credits, are pursuing
Itself into forgetfulness.

Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,
There is a moral desert now :

The mean and miserable huts,

The yet more wretched palaces,

Contrasted with those ancient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion ;

The long and lonely colonnades,

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,
Seem like a well-known tune,

Which, in some dear scene we have loved to hear,
Remembered now in sadness.

But, oh! how much more changed,
How gloomier is the contrast

Of human nature there!

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,
A coward and a fool, spreads death around—
Then, shuddering, meets his own.

Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,
A cowled and hypocritical monk
Prays, curses, and deceives.

Spirit! ten thousand years
Have scarcely past away,

Since, in the waste where now the savage drinks
His enemy's blood, and aping Europe's sons,
Wakes the unholy song of war,

Arose a stately city,

Metropolis of the western continent :
There, now, the mossy column-stone,
Indented by time's unrelaxing grasp,
Which once appeared to brave
All, save its country's ruin;
There the wild forest scene,

Rude in the uncultivated loveliness

Of gardens long run wild,

Seems, to the unwilling sojourner, whose steps
Chance in that desert has delayed,

Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.
Yet once it was the busiest haunt,
Whither, as to a common centre, flocked
Strangers, and ships, and merchandize :
Once peace and freedom blest
The cultivated plain :

But wealth, that curse of man,

Blighted the bud of its prosperity :
Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,

Fled, to return not, until man shall know

That they alone can give the bliss
Worthy a soul that claims
Its kindred with eternity.

There's not one atom of yon earth
But once was living man;
Nor the minutest drop of rain,
That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
But flowed in human veins :
And from the burning plains
Where Libyan monsters yell,
From the most gloomy glens
Of Greenland's sunless clime,
To where the golden fields
Of fertile England spread
Their harvest to the day,
Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.

How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things,
To whom the fragile blade of grass,
That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon,

Is an unbounded world;

I tell thee that those viewless beings,
Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel, and live like man ;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the laws
Ruling their moral state;
And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses
The slightest, faintest motion,
Is fixed and indispensable

As the majestic laws

That rule yon rolling orbs.

The Fairy paused. The Spirit,

In ecstasy of admiration, felt

All knowledge of the past revived; the events Of old and wondrous times,

Which dim tradition interruptedly

Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded
In just perspective to the view;
Yet dim from their infinitude.
The Spirit seemed to stand

High on an isolated pinnacle;
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around
Nature's unchanging harmony.

III.

Fairy the Spirit said,
And on the Queen of Spells

Fixed her ethereal eyes,

I thank thee. Thou hast given
A boon which I will not resign, and taught
A lesson not to be unlearned. I know

The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly :

For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.

MAB.

Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!
Much yet remains unscanned.
Thou knowest how great is man,
Thou knowest his imbecility :
Yet learn thou what he is;
Yet learn the lofty destiny
Which restless time prepares
For every living soul.

Behold a gorgeous palace, that, amid
Yon populous city, rears its thousand towers
And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops
Of sentinels, in stern and silent ranks,
Encompass it around the dweller there
Cannot be free and happy; hearest thou not
The curses of the fatherless, the groans

Of those who have no friend? He passes on:
The King, the wearer of a gilded chain

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave

Even to the basest appetites-that man

Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles

At the deep curses which the destitute

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan But for those morsels which his wantonness

Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save

All that they love from famine: when he hears
The tale of horror, to some ready-made face
Of hypocritical assent he turns,

Smothering the glow of shame, that, spite of him,
Flushes his bloated cheek.

Now to the meal

Of silence, grandeur, and excess, he drags
His palled unwilling appetite. If gold,
Gleaming around, and numerous viands culled
From every clime, could force the loathing sense
To overcome satiety, -if wealth

The spring it draws from poisons not,-or vice,
Unfeeling, stubborn vice, converteth not
Its food to deadliest venom; then that king
Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils
His unforced task, when he returns at even,