As thus the snows arise; and foul and fierce,
All winter drives along the darken'd air;
In his own loose-revolving fields, the swain Disaster'd stands; sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain;
Nor finds the river, nor the forest,
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on,
From hill to dale, still more and more astray;
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour
In many a vain attempt.
How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fill his heart!
When, for the dusky spot, which fancy
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track, and blest abode of man;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And ev'ry tempest howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep,
A dire descent, beyond the pow'r of frost!
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,
Smooth'd up with snow; and what is land, unknown,
What water, of the still unfrozen spring,
In the loose marsh or solitary lake,
Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful steps; and down he
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mix'd with the tender anguish nature
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him th' officious wife
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping
Into the mingled storm, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence.
Alas!
Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold;
Nor friends, nor sacred home.
On ev'ry
The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffen'd corse,
Stretch'd out and bleaching in the northern blast.
Ah, little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, pow'r, and affluence surround;
They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel riot, waste;
Ah, little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death,
All the sad variety of pain.
How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame.
How many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man!
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms,
Shut from the common air, and common
Of their own limbs!
How many drink the
Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter
Of misery!
Sore pierc'd by wintry
How many shrink into the sordid
Of cheerless poverty!
How many
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind,
Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse!
How many, rack'd with honest passions,
In deep retir'd distress!
How many
Around the death-bed of their dearest friends,
And point out the parting anguish!
Thought fond
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills,
That one incessant struggle render life,
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appall'd,
And heedless rambling impulse learn to think;
The conscious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide wish benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh;
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work.
