How wond’rous is this scene! where all is form’d With number, weight, and measure! all design’d For some great end! where not alone the plant Of stately growth; the herb of glorious hue, Or food-full substance! not the laboring steed, The herd, and flock that feed us; not the mine That yields us stores for elegance and use; The sea that loads our table, and conveys The wanderer man from clime to clime, with all Those rolling spheres, that from on high shed down Their kindly influence; not these alone, Which strike ev’n eyes incurious, but each moss, Each shell, each crawling insect, holds a rank Important in the plan of Him, who fram’d This scale of beings; holds a rank, which lost, Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap Which nature’s self would rue. Almighty Being, Cause and support of all things, can I view These objects of my wonder; can I feel These fine sensations, and not think of thee? Thou who dost thro’ th’ eternal round of time, Dost thro’ th’ immensity of space exist Alone, shalt thou alone excluded be From this thy universe? Shall feeble man Think it beneath his proud philosophy To call for thy assistance, and pretend To frame a world, who cannot frame a clod?-- Not to know thee, is not to know ourselves-- Is to know nothing--nothing worth the care Of man’s exalted spirit:--all becomes, Without thy ray divine, one dreary gloom, Where lurk the monsters of phantastic brains, Order bereft of thought, uncaus’d effects, Fate freely acting, and unerring chance. Where meanless matter to a chaos sinks, Or something lower still, for without thee It crumbles into atoms void of force, Void of resistance--it eludes our thought. Where laws eternal to the varying code Of self-love dwindle. Interest, passion, whim, Take place of right and wrong, the golden chain Of beings melts away, and the mind’s eye Sees nothing but the present. All beyond Is visionary guess--is dream--is death.[23]
[23] Stillingfleet’s Miscellaneous Tracts.
OF VISION; OF THE OPTICAL EFFECT OF MICROSCOPES, AND OF THE MANNER OF ESTIMATING THEIR MAGNIFYING POWERS.
The progress that has been made in the science of optics, in the last and present century, particularly by Sir Isaac Newton, may with propriety be ranked among the greatest acquisitions of human knowledge. And Mess. Delaval and Herschel have shewn by their discoveries, that the boundaries of this science may be considerably enlarged.