While light peeps through the darkness, like a spy; And darkness shows its grandeur by the light. Nor is the profit greater than the joy, If human hearts at glorious objects glow, And admiration can inspire delight. What speak I more, than I, this moment, feel? With pleasing stupor first the soul is struck (Stupor ordain'd to make her truly wise!): Then into transport starting from her trance, 740 With love, and admiration, how she glows! This gorgeous apparatus! this display! This ostentation of creative power! This theatre!--what eye can take it in? By what divine enchantment was it raised, For minds of the first magnitude to launch In endless speculation, and adore? One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine; And light us deep into the Deity; How boundless in magnificence and might! 750 O what a confluence of ethereal fires, Form urns unnumber'd, down the steep of heaven, Streams to a point, and centres in my sight! Nor tarries there; I feel it at my heart. My heart, at once, it humbles, and exalts; Lays it in dust, and calls it to the skies. Who sees it unexalted? or unawed? Who sees it, and can stop at what is seen? Material offspring of Omnipotence! Inanimate, all-animating birth! 760 Work worthy Him who made it! worthy praise! All praise! praise more than human! nor denied 762 Thy praise divine!--But though man, drown'd in sleep, Withholds his homage, not alone I wake; Bright legions swarm unseen, and sing, unheard By mortal ear, the glorious Architect, In this His universal temple hung With lustres, with innumerable lights, That shed religion on the soul; at once, The temple, and the preacher! O how loud 770 It calls devotion! genuine growth of Night! Devotion! daughter of Astronomy! An undevout astronomer is mad. True; all things speak a God; but in the small, Men trace out Him; in great, He seizes man; Seizes, and elevates, and wraps, and fills With new inquiries, 'mid associates new. Tell me, ye stars! ye planets! tell me, all Ye starr'd, and planeted, inhabitants! what is it? What are these sons of wonder? say, proud arch 780 (Within those azure palaces they dwell), Built with divine ambition! in disdain Of limit built! built in the taste of heaven! Vast concave! ample dome! wast thou design'd A meet apartment for the Deity?-- Not so; that thought alone thy state impairs, Thy lofty sinks, and shallows thy profound, And straitens thy diffusive; dwarfs the whole, And makes a universe an orrery[60]. But when I drop mine eye, and look on man, 790 Thy right regain'd, thy grandeur is restored, O Nature! wide flies off th' expanding round. As when whole magazines, at once, are fired, The smitten air is hollow'd by the blow;