Imagine such a horror, and to one
Present, who would have died, or borne extremes
Of any hard endurance, not to give
The slightest anguish to a parent’s breast! 
Alas! the cruel rashness of reproof—­
The busy vigilance of human pride—­
Like a too eager partizan, may strike,
To ward off danger from his chieftain’s head,
A fellow soldier zealous in the cause!

As of this world, this visible, wide world,
This earth, with all its forests, all its plants,
All its deep mines, its rivers, and its seas,
Yea! all that breathes, and moves, and clings to life
By any subtler impulse, which eludes
Our blunted observation:—­as of this,
All that appears and all that is, so much
Remains, in scorn of science, unexplor’d;
So, in the not less wond’rous moral world,
The innermost recesses of the mind,
We see as little; save, Phoenician like,
By petty trade and parley on its coasts,
Talk by interpreters, impatient guess,
Or careless resting in incertitude,
At meanings in a tongue almost unknown;
Or so corrupted by this intercourse,
That all its native harmony is lost,
Its irresistible persuasions o’er! 
The clearness and the sweetness of its tones,
Its loftiness, simplicity and truth.

All that we hear is coarse and limited,
And yet we sail along and search no more,
And look no farther, though the ear is pall’d
With the vile din of tame monotony,
The taste perverted, judgment led astray,
By soul-annihilating idleness,
By universal, strengthless poverty,
Which leans upon its neighbour for support,
And lifts the eye for sanction, or assent,
To weakness still more helpless than its own!

Two thousand years the sanctuary’s veil
Has now been rent asunder, shewing all
That, to the patient and unsandall’d foot,
Egress and regress freely are allowed
Through that most glorious temple, where abstract,
And long a stranger to the vulgar eye,
Thought held her silent rule, and mission’d forth
Her sealed and unquestion’d messengers. 
Yet those who follow nature when the track
Is finer than a hair—­those who can cleave
The subtile and combined elements
That form a drop of water—­those can shrink
From the more holy alchemy enjoin’d,
Call’d for by that disgust the heart conceives
At the usurping empire of pretence;
At all those useless and disgraceful chains,
Which tie us down, and imp with aptest wings,
Falsehood and selfishness, who ought to creep
In their own reptile slime, and dart away
When eyes perceiv’d their presence.  Oh! could those
Adventure in too perilous a path,
If without other guide than the bright stars,
The love of what is lofty and divine,
Or the desire of gaining for mankind,
Now fettered and held down to poison’d food,
Its unpolluted birth-right
                          —­they dared on,
Plunging at once into untravelled realms,
And bringing, as the harvest of their toil,
Arms which will make each potent talisman,
Each charm, and spell, and dire enchantment sink
In endless infamy—­without a hope
To trick their bloated, and their wither’d limbs,
In any Proteus vestment of disguise,
Again to awe and ruinate the world.