Alas! how little can a moment show Of an eye where feeling plays In ten thousand dewy rays: A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!

Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led.

And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams.

A light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.