Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/274

264 and dark as the grave. My soul and body seem at once laid out, and I fancy all the plummets of eternal night already hanging upon my temples. But whence proceed these fears? Certainly they are not idle dreams, nor the accidental product of my disease, which disorders the brains, and fills ’em with odd chimeras. Why should my soul be averse to its enlargement? Why should it be content to be knit up in two yards of skin, when it may have all the world for its purlieu? 'Tis not that I'm unwilling to leave my relations and present friends: I'm parted from the first already, and could be severed from both the length of the whole map, and live with my body as far distant from them as my soul must when I'm dead. Neither is it that I'm loth to leave the delights and pleasures of the world; some of them I have tried, and found empty, the others covet not, because unknown. I'm confident I could despise 'em all by a greatness of soul, did not the Bible oblige me, and divines tell me, 'tis my duty. It is not neither that I'm unwilling to go hence before I've established a reputation, and something to make me survive myself. I could have been content to be still-born, and have no more than the register or sexton to tell that I've never been in the land of the living. In fine, 'tis not from a principle of cowardice, which the schools have called self-preservation, the poor effect of instinct and dull pretence of a brute as well as me. This unwillingness, therefore, and aversion to undergo the general fate, must have a juster original, and flow from a more important cause. I'm well satisfied that this other being within, that moves and actuates my frame of flesh and blood, has a life beyond it and the grave; and something in it prompts me to believe its immortality. A residence it must have somewhere else, when it has left this carcase, and another state to pass into, unchangeable and everlasting as itself, after its separation. This condition must be good or bad, according to its actions and deserts in this life ; for as it owes its being to some infinite power that created it, I well suppose it his vassal, and obliged to live by his law; and as certainly conclude, that according to the keeping or breaking of that law, 'tis to be rewarded or punished hereafter. This diversity of rewards and punishments makes the two places, heaven and hell, so often mentioned in Scripture, and talked of in pulpits. Of the latter my fears too cruelly convince me, and the anticipation of its torment, which I already feel in my own conscience. There is, there is a hell, and damned fiends, and a never dying worm, and that sceptic that doubts of it, may find 'em all within my single breast. I dare not any longer, with the atheist, disbelieve them, or think 'em the