Acquaint thyself with God if thou wouldst taste His works. Admitted once to His embrace, Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before; Thine eye shall be instructed, and thine heart, Made pure, shall relish, with divine delight Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought. Brutes graze the mountain-top with faces prone, And eyes intent upon the scanty herb It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow, Ruminate, heedless of the scene outspread Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away From inland regions to the distant main. Man views it and admires, but rests content With what he views. The landscape has his praise, But not its Author. Unconcerned who formed The paradise he sees, he finds it such, And such well pleased to find it, asks no more. Not so the mind that has been touched from heaven, And in the school of sacred wisdom taught To read His wonders, in whose thought the world, Fair as it is, existed ere it was. Nor for its own sake merely, but for His Much more who fashioned it, he gives it praise; Praise that from earth resulting as it ought To earth’s acknowledged Sovereign, finds at once Its only just proprietor in Him. The soul that sees Him, or receives sublimed New faculties or learns at least to employ More worthily the powers she owned before; Discerns in all things what, with stupid gaze Of ignorance, till then she overlooked, A ray of heavenly light gilding all forms Terrestrial, in the vast and the minute The unambiguous footsteps of the God Who gives its lustre to an insect’s wing And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds. Much conversant with heaven, she often holds With those fair ministers of light to man That fill the skies nightly with silent pomp Sweet conference; inquires what strains were they With which heaven rang, when every star, in haste To gratulate the new-created earth, Sent forth a voice, and all the sons of God Shouted for joy.—“Tell me, ye shining hosts That navigate a sea that knows no storms, Beneath a vault unsullied with a cloud, If from your elevation, whence ye view Distinctly scenes invisible to man And systems of whose birth no tidings yet Have reached this nether world, ye spy a race Favoured as ours, transgressors from the womb And hasting to a grave, yet doomed to rise And to possess a brighter heaven than yours? As one who, long detained on foreign shores, Pants to return, and when he sees afar His country’s weather-bleached and battered rocks, From the green wave emerging, darts an eye Radiant with joy towards the happy land; So I with animated hopes behold, And many an aching wish, your beamy fires, That show like beacons in the blue abyss, Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home From toilsome life to never-ending rest. Love kindles as I gaze. I feel desires