When the proud steed shall know why man restrains
  His fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains;
  When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,
  Is now a victim, and now Egypt’s god: 
  Then shall man’s pride and dulness comprehend
  His actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end;
  Why doing, suffering, checked, impelled; and why
  This hour a slave, the next a deity.

  Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
  Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought: 
  His knowledge measured to his state and place,
  His time a moment, and a point his space. 
  If to be perfect In a certain sphere,
  What matter, soon or late, or here or there? 
  The blest to-day is as completely so,
  As who began a thousand years ago.

  III.

  Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
  All but the page prescribed, their present state: 
  From brutes what men, from men what spirits know
  Or who could suffer being here below? 
  The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
  Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? 
  Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
  And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
  Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
  That each may fill the circle marked by Heaven: 
  Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
  A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
  Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
  And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

  Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
  Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore. 
  What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
  But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. 
  Hope springs eternal in the human breast: 
  Man never is, but always to be blessed. 
  The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
  Bests and expatiates in a life to come.

  Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
  Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
  His soul, proud science never taught to stray
  Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
  Yet simple nature to his hope has given,
  Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler Heaven;
  Some safer world in depths of woods embraced,
  Some happier island in the watery waste,
  Where slaves once more their native land behold,
  No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
  To be, contents his natural desire,
  He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
  But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
  His faithful dog shall bear him company.

  IV.

  Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense
  Weigh thy opinion against Providence;
  Call imperfection what thou fanciest such,
  Say, ‘Here he gives too little, there too much;’
  Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,
  Yet cry, ‘If man’s unhappy, God’s unjust;’
  If man alone engross not Heaven’s high care,