Page:The Pleasures of Imagination - Akenside (1744).djvu/52

That wheel the pensile planets round the year;
Whether in wonders of the rowling deep,
Or smiling fruits of pleasure-pregnant earth,
Or fine-adjusted springs of life and sense,
You scan the counsels of their author's hand.135

What, when to raise the meditated scene,
The flame of passion, thro' the struggling soul
Deep-kindled, shows across that sudden blaze
The object of its rapture, vast of size,
With fiercer colours and a night of shade?140
What? like a storm from their capacious bed
The sounding seas o'erwhelming, when the might
Of these eruptions, working from the depth
Of man's strong apprehension, shakes his frame
Even to the base; from every naked sense145
Of pain or pleasure dissipating all
Opinion's feeble cov'rings, and the veil
Spun from the cobweb-fashion of the times
To hide the feeling heart? Then nature speaks
Her genuine language, and the words of men,150
Big with the very motion of their souls,
Declare with what accumulated force,
Th' impetuous nerve of passion urges on
The native weight and energy of things.

Yet more; her honours where nor beauty claims,155
Nor shews of good the thirsty sense allure,

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