soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. Thus, in "The Revenge," "Alonzo," in the conflict of jealousy and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife, says:
"This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun,
Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.
What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.
Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!
Our life is but a chain of many deaths.
Can then Death's self be feared? Our life much rather:
Life is the desert, life the solitude;
Death joins us to the great majority;
'Tis to be born to Plato and to Cæsar;
'Tis to be great forever;
'Tis pleasure, 'tis ambition, then, to die."
His prose writings all read like the "Night Thoughts," either diluted into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his "Thoughts for Age," he says:
"Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our old acquaintance, Time; though now so wasted and reduced, that we can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe: our age enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his annihilation is at hand."
This is a dilution of the magnificent image—
"Time in advance behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep decrepit with his age.
Behold him when past by! What then is seen
But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds?"
Again:
"A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; which
