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.

    76/144 (page 72)
    335 The bed and faired of unnumber’d worlds That lay from everlading in the dore Of his divine conceptions. Nor content, By one exertion of creative pow’r His goodnds to reveal; thro’ every age, Thro’ every moment up the tradl of time 340 His parent-hand with ever-new increafe Of happinefs and virtue has adorn’d The vad harmonious frame : his parent-hand, From the mute fhell-fifh gafping on the fhore. To men, to angels, to cceledial minds 345 The heft and fair eft, Sec. ] This opinion is fo old, that Tinueus Locrus calls the fupreme being 'iw Bzftliovos, the artificer of that which is heft ; and reprefents him as refolv- jngin the beginning to produce the moll excellent work, and as copying the world moft exaftly from his own intelligible and ef- fential idea; fo that it yet remains, as it was at firft, perfect in beauty, and will never ft and in need of any correction or improve¬ ment. There can be no room for a caution here, to underlland thefe exprefiions, not of any particular circumftances of human life feparately confider’d, but of the fum or univerfal fyllem of life and being. See alfo the vifion at the end of the Theodicee of JLeibnitic. For