The greatest
of all is this, that true and real wonders
should happen so perpetually, so daily.
Without this universal miracle
a thinking man had scarcely called those such,
which only children, recha, ought to name so,
who love to gape and stare at the unusual
and hunt for novelty.
Pride, rank pride!
The iron pot would with a silver prong
Be lifted from the furnace to imagine
Itself a silver vase.
Why yes; a man indeed had furnished us
With more occasions to be useful to him.
God knows how readily we should have seized them.
But then he would have nothing, wanted nothing
Was in himself wrapped up, and self-sufficient,
As angels are.
Yet gratitude, the patriarch thinks, is not
a debt before the eye of God or man,
Unless for our own sakes the benefit
Had been conferred.
Better still
The proverb says that monks and women are
The devil's clutches; and I'm tossed to-day
From one to th' other.
Tis a long hundred leagues to Babylon;
And to get in one's debts is no employment,
That speeds a traveller.
I shall be silent;
But what of sinful in the eye of heaven
Springs out of it—not I, not I could help;
It falls upon thy head.
No, you have been always docile.
See now, a forehead vaulted thus, or thus -
a nose bow'd one way rather than another -
Eye-brows with straiter, or with sharper curve -
a line, a mole, a wrinkle, a mere nothing
I th' countenance of an European savage -
And thou—art saved, in Asia, from the fire.
Ask ye for signs and wonders after that?
What need of calling angels into play?
Dead surely not—for God rewards the good
Done here below, here too. Go; but remember
How easier far devout enthusiasm is
Than a good action; and how willingly
Our indolence takes up with pious rapture,
Tḥ at the time unconscious of its end,
Only to save the toil of useful deeds.
That all a beggar's wants are only
Known to a beggar: such alone can tell
How to relieve them usefully and wisely.