Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers, Is Reason to the soul: and as on high, Those rolling fires discover but the sky, Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering ray Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way, But guide us upward to a better day. And as those nightly tapers disappear, When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere; So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight; So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light. Some few whose light shone brighter, have been led From cause to cause, to nature's secret head; And found that one first principle must be, But what, or who, that Universal HE; Whether some soul incompassing this ball, Unmade, unmov'd, yet making, moving all, Or various atoms' interfering dance Leap'd into form, the noble work of chance, Or this great All was from eternity-- Not even the Stagirite himself could see, And Epicurus guess'd as well as he; As blindly groped they for a future state, As rashly judged of providence and fate. In this wild maze their vain endeavors end: How can the less the greater comprehend? Or finite Reason reach Infinity? For what could fathom God were more than He. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. JOHN DRYDEN was born on the 9th of August, 1631, at Aldwincle All Saints, near Oundle in Northamptonshire. He was educated at Westminster School, under the famous Dr. Busby, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-six he went up to London with the intention of devoting himself to literature and politics. During the brief remaining years of the Commonwealth (1657-1660) he was nominally a friend to the Puritan party; and one of the first poems written by him was a series of "Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell." At the Restoration he at once espoused the cause of the Royalists; and his recent panegyric on the Protector did not prevent him from writing a poem, "Astræa Redux," in honor of the return of Charles the Second. In 1663 he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a Royalist nobleman. For several years he devoted himself chiefly to the writing of plays,--comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies. The comedies he wrote in prose; the earliest tragedies in blank verse, followed by several in rhyme, and, after these, others in blank verse. In 1670 he was appointed Poet-Laureate. In 1681, when nearly fifty years old, by the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel," he suddenly became famous as a satirical poet. He soon afterwards wrote "The Medal," another satire, directed against the Earl of Shaftesbury, and "Mac Flecknoe," aimed at Shadwell, the chief poet of the Opposition. At about the same time he produced "Religio Laici," a didactic poem explaining his religious opinions and defending the Church of England against dissenters, atheists, and Catholics.