This law, thou say’st, revolts thy sense of right; It strikes thee merely as a strange caprice; A snare where reason trips at every step— Let us confess and judge it not, great bard! Like thine, my mind with darkness is replete, And not for me it is to explain the world: Let Him who made, explain the universe. The more I sound the abyss, the more, alas! I lose myself amid its viewless depths. Grief, here below, to grief is ever linked, Day follows day, and pain succeeds to pain. In nature bounded, infinite in wish, Man is a fallen god rememb’ring Heaven: Whether that, disinherited of all His pristine glory, he doth still preserve The mem’ry of his former destinies, Or that the vastness of his wishes gives A distant presage of his future greatness— Imperfect at his birth, or fallen since— The great, the awful mystery is man. Within the senses’ prison chained on earth, A slave, he feels a heart for freedom born, And wretched, to felicity aspires. He strives to sound the world; his eye is weak;— He yearns to love; whate’er he loves is frail. All mortals unto Eden’s exile bear A sad resemblance—when his outraged God Had banished him from that celestial realm, Scanning the fatal limits with a look, He sat him, weeping, near the barred gates, He heard within the blest abode afar, The sigh harmonious of eternal love, Sweet strains of happiness, the choral song Of angels sounding God’s triumphant praise; And tearing then his soul from heav’n, his eye Fell back affrighted on his dismal lot. Woe, woe to him who from his exile here Hath heard the concerts of an envied world! When Nature once ideal nectar tastes, She loathes the cup Reality presents. Into the possible, in dreams she leaps; (The real is cramped; the possible, immense;) The soul with all her wishes there doth take Her sojourn, where forever she may drink From crystal springs of knowledge and of love, And where, in streams of beauty and of light, Man, ever thirsty, slakes his thirst. And thus, with Syren visions charming sleep On waking, scarce she knows herself again. Such was thy fate, and such my destiny! I too the poisoned cup did drain; like thine My eyes were opened, seeing not; in vain I sought the enigma of the universe; I questioned nature for its cause; I asked Each creature why created; down the abyss, The bottomless abyss, I plunged my look; From the atom to the sun, I all explored; Anticipated time, its stream did mount; Now passing over seas to hear the words That drop from wisdom’s oracles; but found The world to pride is ever a sealed book! Now, to divine the world inanimate. To nature’s bosom flying with my soul, I thought to find a meaning in her voice.