THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE.
Ah! who can tell what horrors urge the wretch
To madness, who infuriate spurns the gift
Of this sweet life?—For life is sweet to him
Who 'neath the ceaseless lash of bondage toils,—
Sweet to the sick man, to the galley-slave,
To him who scorches 'neath a vertic sun,
Or feels the breath of everlasting snows
Congeal his soul.—Yes! life is sweet to him
Who through his dungeon-grate the scanty ray
Hails, though it serve him but to mark the chains
Gnawing his wasted flesh.—The mariner,
Buoy'd on some fragment of his broken ship,
Buffets the wave.—Wherefore?—His all is lost,
And the cold world is but a wreck to him,
Yet his blanch'd lip above the billow sighs
That life is sweet.—
Ah! life is sweet to him,
The most despised and isolated wretch
Who holds nor tie, nor brotherhood to man.
Ye cannot wrest it from the vilest brute
Or noisome reptile, but they shun with cries
Your purpose, or uplift their feeble shield,
As best they may, to guard their dearest boon.
But man, creation's idol!—he, for whom
Yon skies were garnish'd, and their nightly lamps
Hung out,—fair earth a nursing-mother made,
And ocean chain'd,—and air surcharged with balm,
If but a rude blast rend his painted sails,
Down, down some gulf he hurls his bark, and shuns
The port of heaven.—Yet oh,—condemn him not!—
Ye cannot tell how bare the scourge may lay
The soul's quick nerve,—how fierce the passions boil,
How dark may be the hiding of God's face,
Or what demoniac forms may seize the helm
Of reason, ere with suicidal haste
He leap that slippery verge, which scarce firm faith
Can tread unshuddering.—
God of power and might!
Have pity on the feeble hearts that shrink
From transient wo, and so instruct them here
To bear life's discipline, that death at last,
Led on by nature, not by rashness urged,
May ope the gate of everlasting life.