But now those white unblemish'd minutes, whence The fabling poets took their golden age, Are found no more amid these iron times, These dregs of life! Now the distemper'd mind Has lost that concord of harmonious powers, Which forms the soul of happiness; and all Is off the poise within: the passions all Have burst their bounds; and reason half-extinct, Or impotent, or else approving, sees The foul disorder. Senseless and deform'd, Convulsive anger storms at large; or, pale And silent, settles into fell revenge. Base envy withers at another's joy, And hates that excellence it can not reach. Desponding fear, of feeble fancies full, Weak and unmanly, loosens every power. Even love itself is bitterness of soul, A pensive anguish pining at the heart; Or, sunk to sordid interest, feels no more That noble wish, that never-cloy'd desire, Which, selfish joy disdaining, seeks alone To bless the dearer object of its flame. Hope sickens with extravagance; and grief, Of life impatient, into madness swells, Or in dead silence wastes the weeping hours. These, and a thousand mix'd emotions more, From ever changing views of good and ill, Form'd infinitely various, vex the mind With endless storm; whence, deeply rankling, grows The partial thought, a listless unconcern, Cold, and averting from our neighbor's good; Then dark disgust, and hatred, winding wiles Coward deceit, and ruffian violence. At last, extinct each social feeling, fell And joyless inhumanity pervades And petrifies the heart. Nature disturb'd Is deem'd, vindictive, to have chang'd her course. Hence, in old dusky time, a deluge came: When the deep-cleft disparting orb, that arch'd The central waters round, impetuous rush'd, With universal burst, into the gulf, And o'er the high-pil'd hills of fractur'd earth Wide-dash'd the waves, in undulation vast; Till, from the centre to the streaming clouds, A shoreless ocean tumbled round the globe. The Seasons since have, with severer sway, Oppress'd a broken world: the Winter keen Shook forth his waste of snows; and Summer shot His pestilential heats. Great Spring, before, Green'd all the year; and fruits and blossoms blush'd, In social sweetness, on the self-same bough. Pure was the temperate air; an even calm Perpetual reign'd, save what the zephyrs bland Breath'd o'er the blue expanse: for then nor storms Were taught to blow, nor hurricanes to rage; Sound slept the waters; no sulphureous glooms Swell'd in the sky, and sent the lightning forth; While sickly damps, and cold autumnal fogs, Hung not, relaxing, on the springs of life. But now, of turbid elements the sport, From clear to cloudy toss'd, from hot to cold, And dry to moist, with inward-eating change,