But sweeter still than this, than these, than all, Is first and passionate love—it stands alone, Like Adam’s recollection of his fall; The tree of knowledge has been pluck’d—all ’s known— And life yields nothing further to recall Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown, No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven Fire which Prometheus filch’d for us from heaven. Man ’s a strange animal, and makes strange use Of his own nature, and the various arts, And likes particularly to produce Some new experiment to show his parts; This is the age of oddities let loose, Where different talents find their different marts; You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your Labour, there’s a sure market for imposture. What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve’s rockets, With which the Doctor paid off an old pox, By borrowing a new one from an ox. Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes; And galvanism has set some corpses grinning, But has not answer’d like the apparatus Of the Humane Society’s beginning By which men are unsuffocated gratis: What wondrous new machines have late been spinning! I said the small-pox has gone out of late; Perhaps it may be follow’d by the great. ’Tis said the great came from America; Perhaps it may set out on its return,— The population there so spreads, they say ’Tis grown high time to thin it in its turn, With war, or plague, or famine, any way, So that civilisation they may learn; And which in ravage the more loathsome evil is— Their real lues, or our pseudo-syphilis? This is the patent-age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions; Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions, Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles, Are ways to benefit mankind, as true, Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo. Man ’s a phenomenon, one knows not what, And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure; ’Tis pity though, in this sublime world, that Pleasure ’s a sin, and sometimes sin ’s a pleasure; Few mortals know what end they would be at, But whether glory, power, or love, or treasure, The path is through perplexing ways, and when The goal is gain’d, we die, you know—and then— What then?—I do not know, no more do you— And so good night.—Return we to our story: ’Twas in November, when fine days are few, And the far mountains wax a little hoary, And clap a white cape on their mantles blue; And the sea dashes round the promontory, And the loud breaker boils against the rock, And sober suns must set at five o’clock.