Page:Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics.djvu/61
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Second
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For if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold;And speckled vanityWill sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;And Hell itself will pass away,And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.
Yea, Truth and Justice thenWill down return to men, Orb’d in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,Mercy will sit betweenThroned in celestial sheen,With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;And Heaven, as at some festival, Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
But wisest Fate says No; This must not yet be so; The Babe yet lies in smiling infancyThat on the bitter crossMust redeem our loss;So both himself and us to glorify: Yet first, to those ychain’d in sleepThe wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep;
With such a horrid clangAs on mount Sinai rangWhile the red fire and smouldering clouds outbrake: The aged Earth aghastWith terrour of that blastShall from the surface to the centre shake,When, at the world’s last session,The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.
And then at last our blissFull and perfect is,But now begins; for from this happy day The old Dragon, under groundIn straiter limits bound. Not half so far casts his usurpéd sway;