“Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no bottom but the Abyss!”
Excerpt From
The French Revolution
Thomas Carlyle
As a matter of record – having otherwise no boon or purpose – I am bound in my heart of hearts to divulge the thrill to have survived thus far this seemingly boundless voyage throughout the galaxy. It approaches I know shameless complacency. Yet it is truly a feature of life’s equally limitless fortuity that there is for some the occasion of unmerited bliss (granted a sometimes regrettable adhesion, distancing as it does those who may be more entitled to the ecstasy). It is however a posture I willingly adopt, not because of any baptismal right but because I am not about to revoke the inheritance of Astraea Redux. Beneath this putative rose-coloured veil my “sanctuary of home is not a dreary void or a dark contentious Hell-on-Earth! ” but rather an undimmed era of hope.
My prediction is in any event irrelevant. What chance have I to turn the tide of benevolence! Yet notwithstanding my approbation of the underlying scheme of luck I am not inclined to dismiss the countenance. Indeed I shall exploit it to the extent of my proclamation! A good thing is as well permitted to disclosure as a bad thing.
JOHN DRYDEN, ASTRAEA REDUX (1660)
Methinks I see those crowds on Dover’s strand
Who in their haste to welcome you to land
Choked up the beach with their still growing store,
And made a wilder torrent on the shore.
While spurred with eager thoughts of past delight
Those who had seen you, court a second sight;
Preventing still your steps, and making haste
To meet you often where so ere you past.
How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May!
(A Month that owns an interest in your name:
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.)
That star that at your birth shone out so bright
It stained the duller sun’s meridian light,
Did once again its potent fires renew
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you.
And now time’s whiter series is begun
Which in soft centuries shall smoothly run;
Those clouds that overcast your morn shall fly
Dispelled to farthest corners of the sky.
Our nation with united interest blessed
Not now content to poise, shall sway the rest.
Abroad your empire shall no limits know,
But like the sea in boundless circles flow.