This is to honour, worship, and adore, This is to love Him: nay, it is far more, It is to enjoy Him, and to imitate The life and glory of His high Estate. 'Tis to receive with holy reverence, To understand His gifts, and with a sense Of pure devotion and humility, To prize His works, His Love to magnify. O happy ignorance of other things Which made me present with that King of Kings! And like Him too! All spirit, life, and power, All love and joy, in His Eternal Bower, A world of innocence as then was mine, In which the joys of Paradise did shine: And while I was not here I was in Heaven, Not resting one, but every, day in seven, For ever minding with a lively sense, The universe in all its excellence. No other thoughts did intervene, to cloy, Divert, extinguish, or eclipse my joy, No other customs, new-found wants, or dreams Invented here polluted my pure streams, No aloes or drugs, no wormwood star Was seen to fall into the sea from far; No rotten soul, did like an apple near My soul approach. There's no contagion here. An unperceived donor gave all pleasures, There nothing was but I, and all my treasures. In that fair world, one only was the Friend, One golden stream, one spring, one only end. There only one did sacrifice and sing To only one Eternal Heavenly King. The union was so strait between them two, That all was either's which my soul could view: His gifts and my possessions, both our treasures; He mine, and I the ocean of His pleasures. He was an ocean of delights from Whom The living springs and golden streams did come: My bosom was an ocean into which They all did run. And me they did enrich. A vast and infinite capacity, Did make my bosom like the Deity, In whose mysterious and celestial mind All ages and all worlds together shin'd, Who tho' He nothing said did always reign, And in Himself Eternity contain. The world was more in me, than I in it. The King of Glory in my soul did sit, And to Himself in me he always gave All that He takes delight to see me have, For so my spirit was an endless Sphere, Like God Himself, and Heaven, and Earth was there. MY SPIRIT I My naked simple Life was I; That Act so strongly shin'd Upon the earth, the sea, the sky, It was the substance of my mind; The sense itself was I. I felt no dross nor matter in my Soul, No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl We see. My essence was capacity, That felt all things; The thought that springs Therefrom's itself. It hath no other wings To spread abroad, nor eyes to see, Nor hands distinct to feel, Nor knees to kneel. But being simple like the Deity In its own centre is a sphere Not shut up here, but everywhere.