Thou art of all created things O _Lord_, the essence and the cause, The source and centre of all bliss; What are those veils of woven light, Where sun and moon and stars unite, The purple morn, the sprangled night, But curtains which Thy mercy draws Between the heavenly world and this? The terrors of the sea and land, When all the elements conspire, The earth and water, storm and fire, Are but the shadows of Thy hand; The lightning’s flash, the howling storm, The dread volcano’s awful blaze, Proclaim Thy glory and Thy praise! Beneath the sunny summer showers Thy love assumes a milder form And writes its angel name in flowers; The wind that flies with winged feet Around the grassy gladdened earth, Seems but commissioned to repeat In echo’s accents--silvery sweet-- That Thou, O _Lord_, didst give it birth. There is a tongue in every flame, There is a tongue in every wave, To these the bounteous Godhead gave These organs but to praise His name! O mighty _Lord_ of boundless space Here canst Thou be both sought and found. For here in everything around Thy presence and Thy power I trace; With faith my guide and my defence, I burn to serve in love and fear; If as a slave, oh! leave me here, If not, O _Lord_, remove me hence! _M’ Carthy, from the Spanish of Calderon._ The _Lord_ of all, Himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire By which the mighty process is maintained; Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow circling ages are as transient days; Whose work is without labour; whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts; And whose beneficence no charge exhausts. Him blind antiquity profaned, not served, With self-taught rites, and under various names, Female and Male Pomona, Pales, Pan, And Flora, and Vertumnus; peopling earth With tutelary goddesses and gods That were not; and commending as they would To each some province, garden, field, or grove. But all are under one. One Spirit, His Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows, Rules universal nature. Not a flower But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain, Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues, And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes, In grains as countless as the sea-side sands, The forms with which He sprinkles all the earth. _Cowper._ The _Lord_ will come! the earth shall quake, The hills their fixed seat forsake; And, with’ring, from the vault of night The stars withdraw their feeble light.