all praise--all honour to receive:
Rejoice in that high presence, gratefully
Offering the vows that thy full heart dilate:
Rejoice that thence there floweth light, whereby
Thy emulative quest to elevate
Thitherward, where unblemished holiness
Irradiates sovereignty, benign as great.

'But here thou pausest, scrupling to confess
A providence of aspect all benign.
Fear not that sceptic scruple to express.
Of truth, Almighty Goodness could assign
Good only to the work of His own hand,
Warmed into life by His own breath divine:
And, where unchecked Beneficence had planned
A home for creatures of a fragile race,
Evoked from nothingness at His command,
Nor care, nor want, nor anguish should have place,
Nor fraud betray, nor violence oppress,
Nor hate inflame, nor wallowing lust debase,
Nor aught be found, save what conspired to bless
The sentient clay, wrought surely for that end,--
For wherefore wrought, if not for happiness?

'Not, as some teach, for mastery to contend
With fate,--in doubtful conflict to engage,--
Struggling, in pain and peril, to ascend
Slowly, through this probationary stage,
Sore let, but tried and chastened, and thereby
Earning on earth a heavenly heritage.

Was there then need that prescience should try,
By ordeal pitiless, assured event,
Disclosed beforehand to prophetic eye?
Need was there, by austere experiment,
To test the frailty and the fall foreknown
Of man, beneath o'erwhelming burthen bent?
In this was tutelar prevision shown?
Hardly may he, in such belief confide,
Who sees his fellow myriads left to groan
In barren penance, without light or guide,
E'en from their birth by fostering vice controlled,
Doomed as they cross life's threshold--doomed untried.

'As hardly, too, may he the dogma hold
That fetters reason with a graduate chain
Of beings, linked in order manifold,
Where, to each link, 'tis given to sustain
A part subservient to the general weal,--
Duly to share the mutual burthen's strain:--
Though who from such allotment would appeal,
Could it be truth that wisdom's masterpiece
Such aid could lack, such feebleness conceal,
Suing its own constituents for release
From wrong innate, throughout its texture wove,
By hard necessity, not light caprice?
But to what purport could premonished Love
A syst