If we were fashioned to be ignorant,
And frisk and frolic with the kid and fawn,
Rest with the sun and waken with the dawn,
Without a care to gall the hands of want;
What means this spacious intellectual grant
Of tangled reason, that hath slowly gone
Through Nature's secrets, till her mysteries yawn,
And new-born Titans in our service pant?
Why is the heart so capable to feel?
Why ebb and flow the rivers of the eye?
Was man aught else before he learned to die?
Or if he was, then let me not conceal
My grander fate, but boast a destiny
Like Paul's, that smote me only to reveal.