~FABLES~ with wonder tell how Terra’s sons With iron force unloos’d the stubborn nerves Of hills, and on the cloud-inshrouded top Of Pelion Ossa pil’d. But if the vast Gigantick deeds of savage strength demand Astonishment from men, what then shalt thou, O what expressive rapture of the soul, When thou before us, ~NEWTON~, dost display The labours of thy great excelling mind; When thou unveilest all the wondrous scene, The vast idea of th’ eternal king, Not dreadful bearing in his angry arm The thunder hanging o’er our trembling heads; But with th’ effulgency of love replete, And clad with power, which form’d th’ extensive heavens. O happy he, whose enterprizing hand Unbars the golden and relucid gates Of th’ empyrean dome, where thou enthron’d Philosophy art seated. Thou sustain’d By the firm hand of everlasting truth Despisest all the injuries of time; Thou never know’st decay when all around, Antiquity obscures her head. Behold Th’ Egyptian towers, the Babylonian walls, And Thebes with all her hundred gates of brass, Behold them scatter’d like the dust abroad. Whatever now is flourishing and proud, Whatever shall, must know devouring age. Euphrates’ stream, and seven-mouthed Nile, And Danube, thou that from Germania’s soil To the black Euxine’s far remoted shore, O’er the wide bounds of mighty nations sweep’st In thunder loud thy rapid floods along. Ev’n you shall feel inexorable time; To you the fatal day shall come; no more Your torrents then shall shake the trembling ground, No longer then to inundations swol’n Th’ imperious waves the fertile pastures drench, But shrunk within a narrow channel glide; Or through the year’s reiterated course When time himself grows old, your wond’rous streams Lost ev’n to memory shall lie unknown Beneath obscurity, and Chaos whelm’d, But still thou sun illuminatest all The azure regions round, thou guidest still The orbits of the planetary spheres; The moon still wanders o’er her changing course, And still, O ~NEWTON~, shall thy name survive: As long as nature’s hand directs the world, When ev’ry dark obstruction shall retire, And ev’ry secret yield its hidden store, Which thee dim-sighted age forbad to see Age that alone could stay thy rising soul. And could mankind among the fixed stars, E’en to th’ extremest bounds of knowledge reach, To those unknown innumerable suns, Whose light but glimmers from those distant worlds, Ev’n to those utmost boundaries, those bars That shut the entrance of th’ illumin’d space Where angels only tread the vast unknown, Thou ever should’st be seen immortal there: In each new sphere, each new-appearing sun, In farthest regions at the very verge Of the wide universe should’st thou be seen. And lo, th’ all-potent goddess ~NATURE~ takes With her own hand thy great, thy just reward Of immortality; aloft in air See she displays, and with eternal grasp Uprears the trophies of great ~NEWTON~’s fame.