Classic Poem

Once, on the mountain's balmy lap reclined,
The sage unlock'd the treasures of his mind;
Pure from his lips sublime instruction came,
As the blest altar breathes celestial flame;
A band of youths and virgins round him press'd,
Whom thus the prophet and the sage address'd:—

“Through the wide universe's boundless range,
All that exist decay, revive, and change:
No atom torpid or inactive lies;
A being, once created, never dies.
The waning moon, when quench'd in shades of night,
Renews her youth with all the charms of light;
The flowery beauties of the blooming year
Shrink from the shivering blast, and disappear;
Yet, warm'd with quickening showers of genial rain,
Spring from their graves, and purple all the plain.
As day the night, and night succeeds the day,
So death re-animates, so lives decay:
Like billows on the undulating main,
The swelling fall, the falling swell again;
Thus on the tide of time, inconstant, roll
The dying body and the living soul.
In every animal, inspired with breath,
The flowers of life produce the seeds of death;—
The seeds of death, though scatter'd in the tomb,
Spring with new vigour, vegetate and bloom.

“When wasted down to dust the creature dies,
Quick, from its cell, the enfranchised spirit flies;
Fills, with fresh energy, another form,
And towers an elephant, or glides a worm;
The awful lion's royal shape assumes;
The fox's subtlety, or peacock's plumes;
Swims, like an eagle, in the eye of noon,
Or wails, a screech-owl, to the deaf, cold moon;
Haunts the dread brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect in the air.
The illustrious souls of great and virtuous men,
In noble animals revive again:
But base and vicious spirits wind their way,
In scorpions, vultures, sharks, and beasts of prey.
The fair, the gay, the witty, and the brave,
The fool, the coward, courtier, tyrant, slave;
Each, in congenial animals, shall find
A home and kindred for his wandering mind.

“Even the cold body, when enshrined in earth,
Rises again in vegetable birth:
From the vile ashes of the bad proceeds
A baneful harvest of pernicious weeds;
The relics of the good, awaked by showers,
Peep from the lap of death, and live in flowers;
Sweet modest flowers, that blush along the vale,
Whose fragrant lips embalm the passing gale.”