’Tis passing strange! yet, born as if to show
Man to himself his most malignant foe,
There are (so desperate is the madness grown)
Who’d rather live a lie than live unknown;
Whose very tongues, with force of holy writ,
Their doctrines damn with self-recoiling wit.

Behold yon dwarf, of visage pale and wan;
A sketch of life, a remnant of a man! 
Whose livid lips, as now he moulds a grin,
Like charnel doors disclose the waste within;
Whose stiffen’d joints within their sockets grind,
Like gibbets creaking to the passing wind;
Whose shrivell’d skin with much adhesion clings
His bones around in hard compacted rings,
If veins there were, no blood beneath could force,
Unless by miracle, its trickling course;—­
Yet even he within that sapless frame,
A mind sustained that climb’d the steeps of fame. 
Such is the form by mystic Heaven design’d,
The earthly mansion of the rarest mind. 
But, mark his gratitude.  This soul sublime,
This soul lord paramount o’er space and time,
This soul of fire, with impious madness sought,
Itself to prove of mortal matter wrought;
Nay, bred, engendered, on the grub-worm plan,
From that vile clay which made his outward man,
That shadowy form which dark’ning into birth,
But seem’d a sign to mark a soul on earth.

But who shall cast an introverted eye
Upon himself, that will not there descry
A conscious life that shall, nor cannot die? 
E’en at our birth, when first the infant mould
Gives it a mansion and an earthly hold,
Th’ exulting Spirit feels the heavenly fire
That lights her tenement will ne’er expire;
And when, in after years, disease and age,
Our fellow-bodies sweeping from life’s stage,
Obtrude the thought of death, e’en then we seem,
As in the revelation of a dream,
To hear a voice, more audible than speech,
Warn of a part which death can never reach. 
Survey the tribes of savage men that roam
Like wand’ring herds, each wilderness their home;—­
Nay, even there th’ immortal spirit stands
Firm on the verge of death, and looks to brighter lands.

Shall human wisdom then, with beetle sight,
Because obstructed in its blund’ring flight,
Despise the deep conviction of our birth,
And limit life to this degraded earth?

Oh, far from me be that insatiate pride,
Which, turning on itself, drinks up the tide
Of natural light; ’till one eternal gloom,
Like walls of adamant enclose the tomb. 
Tremendous thought! that this transcendant Power,
Fell’d with the body in one fatal hour,
With all its faculties, should pass like air
For ages without end as though it never were!