The pleasures of imagination. A poem / In three books.

  • Mark Akenside
Date:
1754
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pleasures of imagination. A poem / In three books. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/144 (page 23)
    Thro5 life and death to dart his piercing eye. With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame * But that th5 Omnipotent might fend him forth 155 In fight of mortal and immortal pow?rs5 As on a boundlefs theatre, to run The great career of juftice; to exalt His gen’rous aim to all diviner deeds ; To chafe each partial purpofe from his bread*, 160 And thro3 the mills of pafiion and of fenfe, intended man for a low-fpirited or ignoble being : but bringing us into life and the midfl of this wide univerfe, as before a multitude affembled at fome heroic folemnity that we might be fpedlators of all her magnificence, and candidates high in emulation for the prize of glory; foe has therefore implanted in our fouls an inextinguishable loose of every thing great and exalted, of every thing which ap¬ pears divine beyond our comprehenfon. Whence it comes to pafs, that even the whole vsorld is not an objedi fujficient for the depth and rapidity of human imagination, which often failles forth be¬ yond the limits of all that furround us. Let any man cafl his eye through the whole circle of our exifence, and confider how efpe- cially it abounds in excellent and grand objects, he will fdon ac-> knowledge for what enjoyments and purfuits we were dejlirfd» ‘Thus by the very propenfty of nature we are led to admire, not little fprings or Jhallow rivulets, however clear and delicious, but the Nile, the Rhine, the Danube, and much more than all, the Ocean, Sec. Dionyf. Longin. de Sublim. §. xxiv. 4