| THE LORD of all, himself through all diffus’d, | |
| Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. | |
| Nature is but a name for an effect, | |
| Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire | |
| By which the mighty process is maintain’d, | 5 |
| Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight | |
| Slow circling ages are as transient days; | |
| Whose work is without labour; whose designs | |
| No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts; | |
| And whose beneficence no charge exhausts. | 10 |
| Him blind antiquity profan’d, not serv’d, | |
| With self-taught rites, and under various names, | |
| Female and male, Pomona, Pales, Pan, | |
| And Flora, and Vertumnus; peopling earth | |
| With tutelary goddesses and gods | 15 |
| That were not; and commending, as they would, | |
| To each some province, garden, field, or grove. | |
| But all are under one. One spirit—His | |
| Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows— | |
| Rules universal nature. Not a flow’r | 20 |
| But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, | |
| Of his unrivall’d pencil. He inspires | |
| Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues, | |
| And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes, | |
| In grains as countless as the sea-side sands, | 25 |
| The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth. | |
| Happy who walks with him! whom what he finds | |
| Of flavour or of scent in fruit or flow’r, | |
| Or what he views of beautiful or grand | |
| In nature, from the broad majestic oak | 30 |
| To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, | |
| Prompts with remembrance of a present God! | |
