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　　THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET

　　From the Latin of Palingenius, in the Zodiacus Vitae

　　(1832)

　　But now time warns (my mission at an end)

　　That to Jove's starry court I re-ascend;

　　From whose high battlements I take delight

　　To scan your earth, diminish'd to the sight,

　　Pendant, and round, and, as an apple, small;

　　Self-propt, self-balanced, and secure from fall

　　By her own weight: and how with liquid robe

　　Blue ocean girdles round her tiny globe,

　　While lesser Nereus, gliding like a snake,

　　Betwixt her hands his flexile course doth take,

　　Shrunk to a rivulet; and how the Po,

　　The mighty Ganges, Tanais, Ister, show

　　No bigger than a ditch which rains have swell'd.

　　Old Nilus' seven proud mouths I late beheld,

　　And mock'd the watery puddles. Hosts steel-clad

　　Ofttimes I thence behold; and how the sad

　　Peoples are punish'd by the fault of kings,

　　Which from the purple fiend Ambition springs.

　　Forgetful of mortality, they live

　　In hot strife for possessions fugitive,

　　At which the angels grieve. Sometimes I trace

　　Of fountains, rivers, seas, the change of place;

　　By ever shifting course, and Time's unrest,

　　The vale exalted, and the mount deprest

　　To an inglorious valley; plough-shares going

　　Where tall trees rear'd their tops; and fresh trees growing

　　In antique pastures. Cities lose their site.

　　Old things wax new. O what a rare delight

　　To him, who from this vantage can survey

　　At once stern Afric, and soft Asia,

　　With Europe's cultured plains; and in their turns

　　Their scatter'd tribes: those whom the hot Crab burns,

　　The tawny Ethiops; Orient Indians;

　　Getulians; ever-wandering Scythians;

　　Swift Tartar hordes; Cilicians rapacious,

　　And Parthians with back-bended bow pugnacious;

　　Sabeans incense-bringing, men of Thrace,

　　Italian, Spaniard, Gaul, and that rough race

　　Of Britons, rigid as their native colds;

　　With all the rest the circling sun beholds!

　　But clouds, and elemental mists, deny

　　These visions blest to any fleshly eye. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 4