Full Title:
The Poems of Mark Akenside, M. D. London, Printed by W. Bowyer and J Nichols: And Sold by J. Dodsley, In Pall Mall. MDCCLXXII.
The Pleasures of the Imagination: Book the Second.
Introduction to this more difficult part of the subject. Of truth and its three classes, matter of fact, experimental or scientifical truth, (contradistinguished from opinion) and universal truth: which last is either metaphysical or geometrical, either purely intellectual or purely abstracted. On the power of discerning truth depends that of acting with the view of an end; a cicumstance essential to virtue. Of virtue, considered in the divine mind as a perpetual and universal beneficence. Of human virtue, considered as a system of particular sentiments and actions, suitable to the design of providence and the condition of man; to whom it constitutes the chief good and the first beauty. Of vice and its origin. Of ridicule: its general nature and first cause. Of the passions; particularly of those which relate to evil natural or moral, and which are generally accounted painful, though not always unattended with pleasure.
Thus far of beauty and the pleasing forms
Which man’s untutor’d fancy, from the scenes
Imperfect of this ever-changing world,
Creates; and views, inamor’d. Now my song
Severer themes demand: mysterious truth;
And virtue, sovran good: the spells, the trains,
The progeny of error: the dread sway
Of passion; and whatever hidden stores
From her own lofty deeds and from herself
The mind acquires. Severer argument:
Not less attractive; nor deserving less
A constant ear. For what are all the forms
Educ’d by fancy from corporeal things,
Greatness, or pomp, or symmetry of parts?
Not tending to the heart, soon feeble grows,
As the blunt arrow ’gainst the knotty trunk,
Their impulse on the sense: while the pall’d eye
Expects in vain its tribute; asks in vain,
Where are the ornaments it once admir’d?
Not so the moral species, nor the powers
Of passion and of thought. The ambitious mind
With objects boundless as her own desires
Can there converse: by these unfading forms
Touch’d and awaken’d still, with eager act
She bends each nerve, and meditates well-pleas’d
Her gifts, her godlike fortune. Such the scenes
Now opening round us. May the destin’d verse
Maintain its equal tenor, though in tracts
Obscure and arduous. May the source of light
All-present, all sufficient, guide our steps
Through every maze: and whom in childish years
From the loud throng, the beaten paths of wealth
And power, thou did’st apart send forth to speak
In tuneful words concerning highest things,
Him still do thou, o father, at those hours
Of pensive freedom, when the human soul
Shuts out the rumour of the world, him still
Touch thou with secret lessons: call thou back
Each erring thought; and let the yielding strains
From his full bosom, like a welcome rill
Spontaneous from its healthy fountain, flow […]
Eighteenth-Century Reading Room 