With blushing wreaths, investing ev'ry spray; Althea with the purple eye; the broom, Yellow and bright, as bullion unalloy'd, Her blossoms; and, luxuriant above all, Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load, And flush into variety again. From dearth to plenty, and from death to life, Is Nature's progress, when she lectures man In heav'nly truth; evincing, as she makes The grand transition, that there lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God. The beauties of the wilderness are his, That make so gay the solitary place Where no eye sees them. And the fairer forms That cultivation glories in, are his. He sets the bright procession on its way, And, ere one flow'ry season fades and dies, Some say that, in the origin of things, When all creation started into birth, The infant elements receiv'd a law,. pass, From which they swerve not since. That under force And need not his immediate hand, who first Thus dream they, and contrive to save a God The great Artificer of all that moves The stress of a continual act, the pain Of unremitted vigilance and care, As too laborious and severe a task. So man, the moth, is not afraid, it seems, Dull as it is, and satisfy a law So vast in its demands, unless impell'd Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire By which the mighty process is maintain'd, Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow circling ages are as transient days; Whose work is without labour; whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts; And whose beneficence no charge exhausts. Him blind antiquity profan'd, not serv'd, With self-taught rites, and under various names, And Flora, and Vertumnus; peopling earth That were not; and commending, as they would, Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding browsRules universal nature. Not a flow'r But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues, Of flavour or of scent in fruit or flow'r, Yet not in vengeance; as this smiling sky, So soon succeeding such an angry night, And these dissolving snows, and this clear stream Recov'ring fast its liquid music, prove. Who then, that has a mind well strung and tun'd To contemplation, and within his reach A scene so friendly to his fav'rite task, Would waste attention at the chequer'd board, His host of wooden warriors to and fro |