Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.
What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.
Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!
Our life is but a chain of many deaths.
Can then Death's self be feared? Our life much rather:
_Life is the desert_, _life the solitude_;
Death joins us to the great majority;
'Tis to be born to Plato and to Caesar;
'Tis to be great forever;
'Tis pleasure, 'tis ambition, then, to die."

His prose writings all read like the "Night Thoughts," either diluted
into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his
"Thoughts for Age," he says:

"Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the
world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our
old acquaintance, _Time_; though now so wasted and reduced, that we
can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe: our age
enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his
scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his
annihilation is at hand."

This is a dilution of the magnificent image--

"Time in advance behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep decrepit with his age.
Behold him when past by! What then is seen
But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds?"

Again:

"A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason
more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but
ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee,
to take in all _that_ suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck
of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power!
Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller
of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in
view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are
weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were
revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on
as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe."

Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts
against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the
"Last Day," emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven
demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his "Ercles' Vein" alternates
with his moral platitudes, and we hav