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.