Page:The poetical works of James Thomson (1895), Volume 2.djvu/19

 Rh Are born and reach their prime and slowly fail,

And all their little lives are self-fulfilled;

They die and are no more, content with age

And weary with infirmity. But Man

Has fear and hope and phantasy and awe,

And wistful yearnings and unsated loves,

That strain beyond the limits of his life,

And therefore Gods and Demons, Heaven and Hell:

This Man, the admirable, the pitiable.

Lo, I look backward some few thousand years,

And see men hewing temples in my rocks

With seated forms gigantic fronting them,

And solemn labyrinthine catacombs

With tombs all pictured with fair scenes of life

And scenes and symbols of mysterious death;

And planting avenues of sphinxes forth,

Sphinxes couched calm, whose passionless regard

Sets timeless riddles to bewildered time,

Forth from my sacred banks to other fanes

Islanded in the boundless sea of air,

Upon whose walls and colonnades are carved

Tremendous hieroglyphs of secret things;

I see embalming of the bodies dead

And judging of the disembodied souls;

I see the sacred animals alive,

And statues of the various-headed gods,

Among them throned a woman and a babe,