And gives to things that matter their true name.
Magnanimous indeed I cannot call,

But stupid, a frail creature born to die,
Nurtured in all distress,

Who says he lives for joy;

And with foul-smelling pride

Fills books that promise new felicities

And glories all unknown

(Not only on this orb

But in the very sky,)

Here, upon earth, to beings whom a breath
Malarial,* a wave

Of turbulent ocean, or the rocking soil
Which tremors shake, destroys so utterly
That even their memory

Great pains will hardly save.

A noble heart is his

Who dares, with mortal eyes,

Look on the common fate;

With tongue unbound, nought taking from the truth,
Confess the evils for our journey meant,

Our weak and low estate;

One who in suffering is strong and great,
And to our other ills

That deeper misery,

Fraternal ire and hate,

Adds not, by charging those of his own kind
With blame for any sorrows that are his—
But her, the criminal

Whose guilt it truly is, who stands to us
By birth our mother, stepdame in intent!
Calls her the enemy, against her rage
Holds that society was first ordained †
With love of each to each

It is significant that the same sequence of ideas appears in the Italian, and interesting to compare the effect on Cowper's darkly devotional mind of a similar catastrophe.

+ Rousseau's theories are here glanced at.

For prompt and mutual aid,

Expected and accorded in the stress

And peril of the war that all must wage;
One in whose sight

To arm the hand of man against his brother,
Spread snares and stumbling blocks

For mutual injury,

Not less infatuate seems than in a camp
Beleaguered, pressed, at hottest of the fight,
If the defenders, careless of the foe,

On their own soldiers levied hateful war
And sought with fire and sword
Their friends to overthrow.*

When thoughts like these, made clear,
Shine forth apparent to the general mind,

And that first dread of Nature which combined
Mortals in social bonds shall have returned,

In part, through wisdom learned;

Then civil intercourse upright and fair,
Justice and piety, will have some root

Better than haughty myths tradition feigns,
Whereon much public probity is based
With such security as all may see

That which on error stands elsewhere attains. Oft on this barren shore

Clad as in mourning by the lava's flow,

That still a wavelike motion seems to show,
I sit at night, and, o'er this wilderness,

Austere and cultureless,

See the clear stars in deeps

Of purest blue come forth,

Whereto the sea her mirror turns below;

And in this glittering sphere

Our universe appear,

And vast serene of heaven, and all aglow.
Then, on these lights I gaze which to my eyes
Are only specks, although in truth so great
That land and sea with such
Compared, seem but a speck;
To whom man and this globe,
Where man himself is nought,

1. 71, Bk. II, 'The Task.'

And 'tis but seemly that, where all deserve
And stand exposed by common peccancy

To what no few have felt, there should be peace,
And brethren in calamity should love.

Are both alike unknown:

And when I see

Those yet again endless and more remote
Clusters or knots of stars,*

Each like a filmy cloud

To us, for whom not man, nor earth alone,

But all summed up in one,

The greater stars, the nearer heavenly host,
And golden sun

Exist not, or but seem

As they to us a point of nebulous light

O poor humanity,

What art thou in my sight!

When, further, I but think

On thy estate below,

Here imaged in the clod beneath my feet,

How, on the other hand,

Thou wouldst be lord and ultimate aim of all,

Fabling so often, as thy pleasure is,

That on this grain of sand

Which 'Earth' we call

The authors of the universe came down
For thy behoof, and talked familiarly
With thee in human guise-

How, too, this age which others would excel
In manners and a true regard of things,
Renewing idle tales, insults the wise:

What thought of thee, unhappy race of man,
What feeling, at the last, my heart assails?
I know not whether pity or scorn prevails.
As when at autumn, on the happy dwelling
Of an ant-nation-in the crumbling glebe
Hollowed with art and toil, competitive,
By this assiduous race,

And providently stored against the cold-
From some high tree a little apple falling,
By ripeness and no other cause brought down,
Breaks, shatters and deforms it at a blow;
So, deluging from the dark sky above,

All suddenly, ruin and night conjoined,
Stones, pumice, cinders, streams of liquid fire
Shot upward by the mountains thund'rous womb

* 1. 214, Bk. III, 'The Task.'

I cannot analyse the air, nor catch

The parallax of yonder luminous point

That seems half quenehed in the immense abyss.

And those bright cities by the sea that stood
On the land's furthest verge, in little space
Crushed, covered and consumed.

Above them now the goat

Browses at will; there other cities stand
To which the buried are but às the soil,
And on the prostrate ruin at her foot
The giant mountain treads as if in pride.
Truly no better care,

Or tenderness has Nature for the seed
Of man than for the breed
Of ants, whom she esteems
Like him, no more nor less.†

And if such carnage be indeed more rare
For man than for the ant, that puny race
Than ours more fruitful seems.

Full eighteen hundred years

Have passed since vanished thus,

By force of fire o'erthrown these populous seats;
And still the villager who heedful rears

His vines, to which on these gaunt fields

The parched and lifeless soil with drudgery yields
Poor nourishment, raises an anxious eye

To that dark summit, in no way appeased,

Still terrible, still menacing to pour
Ruin and death on him, his little ones,
And their scant household store!

Often the jaded hind

All night lies sleepless, starting up at times

To pace the ground, or from his hovel's roof,

* Two forms of activity on the part of the volcano are here indicated. Burning material was thrown up into the sky and then descended in a fiery hail on the district. Lava also overflowed from the brink of the crater and poured down like a sea of fire to the coast.

L. was well acquainted with Pope whose somewhat similar lines may recur to the reader:

'He sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall.

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.'

Accurately 1757 years at the date of the poem. A.D. 79 was the year of

the eruption.

In the hot wind,

Watch the descending track

Of the dread current, seething, that o'erflows
From the exhaustless womb

Adown the ash strewn back,

And burns, and glows,

Shining afar o'er Caprian sea and land,
Naples, the port, and Mergellina's strand.
Then if he see it near,

Or, from the bottom of the cottage well
Ever a sound can hear

Of water bubbling up,

In haste he wakes his children, wakes his wife,
With all that they can carry, swift! away!*

And fleeing, sees far off his little field

And dear familiar nest,

Their sole resource from want,

Become the prey

Of the devouring flood,

Inexorable, that hissing glides along

And spreads itself o'er all, enduringly.
Returns Pompeii, dead, to the heaven's light
After oblivion of the ages flown,

As from the earth a buried skeleton,
Which piety or greed† has disinterred,
Comes forth to open day;

And in the desolate Forum where he stands

Mid rows of columns broken or o'erthrown,

The traveller from strange lands

Gazes aloft at the divided steep,‡

And smoking crest,

That threaten still the ruins round him strewed.
There, in the dread uncertain hour of night,§
Through empty theatres, disfigured shrines,

And houses rent in twain,

Where the bat hides her brood,

The solicitude of the poor man for his children is here contrasted with nature's callousness.

Piety to provide more honourable sepulture.

Greed to rob the dead.

The top of Vesuvius presents a bifurcated appearance. The 'cresta fumante' is the crater.

§ At this point Dr Garnett's criticism comes to mind: 'In L.'s later days his horizon seemed to expand.... La Ginestra, inspired by the hardy and humble Broom-plant flourishing on the brink of the lava-fields of Vesuvius, is more original in conception and ampler in sweep than any of its predecessors.'