I.
Immortal Harmony! thy heavenly strain
Coeval grew with sea, and earth, and skies.-
What time from chaos’ rude primeval reign
The Almighty Fiat bade creation rise,
The angelic host around applauding stood,
And loud their golden lyres proclaim’d that all was good.-
Those sacred lays whose voice sublime
High heaven’s eternal mansions hear,
Amid the transient lapse of time
Shall never meet the human ear,
Till, torn the veil of flesh away,
Stand to the soul confess’d the realms of endless day.
II.
Yet streams from that immortal source,
Were not to mortal sense denied,
On Israel’s race with swelling force
Unbounded rush’d the sacred tide:
Judea’s palmy groves around
Re-echo to the hallow’d sound.-
Now to the harp’s responsive strings
His plaintive hymn Jessides sings,
Now with exulting rapture glows
O’er dread Jehovah’s prostrate foes,
Isaiah now with fiercer fire
Strikes loud the bold prophetic wire,
And treads, or seems in act to tread,
O’er proud Assyria’s vanquish’d head.
While now the lay pathetic thrills
By Babel’s willow-border’d rills,
As from Judea’s captive train
The victor’s taunting voice demands the choral strain.
III.
But hark!-what lays enchanting sound
Unroots the forest from the ground?
By the persuasive powers subdu’d
Charm’d from the prey the savage brood
Attentive listen round.-
‘Tis he, the first of Grecia’s choir,
‘Tis Orpheus strikes the living lyre!
And see Alc
(Henry James Pye)
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Based on Topics: God Poems, Time Poems, Soul Poems, Immortality Poems, Charm Poems, Harmony PoemsBased on Keywords: coeval, grecia, alc, jessides