How firm your trust, how sweet your confidence! You know ’twas not capricious prudery, For your caresses had been oft received; Nor was it sly hypocrisy to win Your heart, for that was long since hers. No thought, But spotless purity, inspired the act; And you are happy, though the Self’s denied. The little things of life, that men account Without a moral value, may be done With reference to Self; but oftenest, The mind regards the act, not its effect Upon the Self. The code of Etiquette, The small amenities of social life, The converse, and the articles of dress, May all belong to Self; but moral acts, Those known as right or wrong, have higher source Than Self in any mode. Within Man’s breast There’s something, apprehending good and bad, Called conscience, or the moral sense; it views, Impartially, each act of his, decides Its quality by rule of right and wrong; All trust its judgments most implicitly.-- The good is found, yields greatest happiness; Yet seek it for the sake of happiness, And good is evil, with its misery! The good must be pursued, because a good, The evil shunned, because an evil. Thus, The moral sense discerns these qualities In others, and directs our love. A blow The deadliest to our love, would be a blow Aimed at the principle of good. A love, Existing through the injuries done to Self, May meet the public’s praise, and feel its own; But love would merit self-contempt, that loved Whate’er opposed the good. The son may treat The mother with unkindness, yet her love Be undiminished; if he lie, or steal, Her love is less; she cannot love his deed, And cannot love the heart from which they flow So with the youth who gives his chair to Age, He does not so resent that Self’s denied Its meed of thanks, as that ingratitude Should thus be manifest, in little things. A comrade, served the same, would anger cause. But him who would give up the highest Self, The soul, for others’ good, you deem a fool; And ask why sacrifice ne’er claimed a soul? Because the soul cannot be sacrificed; No harm to that can others benefit. But if it could, how truly grand the man Who’d take eternal woe for fellow-men! But God, who makes the soul the care of life, Makes every soul stand for itself alone, And in His wisdom hath ordained this law: The greater good man gets for his own soul, The greater good on others’ he confers, While evil to himself, an evil gives.