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C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Aspirations after the Infinite

By Mark Akenside (1721–1770)

From ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’

WHO that, from Alpine heights, his laboring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Thro’ mountains, plains, thro’ empires black with shade,

And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul

Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing

Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth

And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft

Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;

Rides on the volleyed lightning through the heavens;

Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,

Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars

The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,

Beholds him pouring the redundant stream

Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway

Bend the reluctant planets to absolve

The fated rounds of Time. Thence, far effused,

She darts her swiftness up the long career

Of devious comets; through its burning signs

Exulting measures the perennial wheel

Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars,

Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,

Invests the orient. Now, amazed she views

The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold

Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;

And fields of radiance, whose unfading light

Has traveled the profound six thousand years,

Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things.

Even on the barriers of the world, untired

She meditates the eternal depth below;

Till half-recoiling, down the headlong steep

She plunges; soon o’erwhelmed and swallowed up

In that immense of being. There her hopes

Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth

Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,

That not in humble nor in brief delight,

Nor in the fading echoes of Renown,

Power’s purple robes, nor Pleasure’s flowery lap,

The soul should find enjoyment: but from these

Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,

Till every bound at length should disappear,

And infinite perfection close the scene.