The Rhode Island American, And General Advertiser

Miscellany.

FROM THE SALEM OBSERVER.

The following extract is from a sublime Ode of John Hughes, in which are incorporated some fragments ascribed to Orpheus.—Whether justly or unjustly imputed to him, the thoughts are hardly surpassed by those of any uninspired poet, ancient or modern. They contain the doctrines of Orpheus with relation to the creation and government of the Universe, somewhat modernized by Hughes, as he himself asserts. The extract which we have made, though of only a few of the stanzas, to a complete ode of itself.

AN ODE

To the Creator of the World,

-Hear, O heaven, and earth, and seas profound!

Hear, ye fates, and let your echoing vaults repeat the sound;

Let nature, trembling all around,

Attend her master's awful name,

From whom heaven, earth, and seas, and all the wide creation came.

He spoke the great command; and High,

Heaven's eldest-born and fairest child,

Flash'd in the lowering face of ancient night,

And pleas'd with its own birth, serenely smil'd.

The sons of morning, on the wing,

Hovering in choirs, his praises sung

When from th'unhonour'd vacant space

A beauteous rising world they saw:

When nature shew'd her yet unfinish'd face,

And motion took the establish'd law

To roll the various globes on high;

When time was taught his infant wings to try,

And from the barrier sprang to his appointed race.

Supreme, Almighty, still the same!

'Tis he, the great inspiring mind,

That animates and moves this universal frame,

Present at once to all, and by no place confin'd.

Not heaven itself can bound his sway;

Beyond th' untravelled limits of the sky,

Invisible to mortal eye

He dwells in uncreated day,

Without beginning, without end; 'tis he

That fills th' unmeasured growing orb of vast immensity.

What power but his can rule the changeful moon?

And wake the sleeping storm, or fix loud rage restrain?

When winds their gather'd forces try,

And the chaf'd ocean proudly swells in vain,

His voice reclaims th' impetuous roar:

In murmuring tides th' abated billows fly,

And the spent tempest dies upon the shore.

The meteor world is his, heaven's wintry store,

The moulded hail, the feather'd snow:

The summer breeze, the soft refreshing shower,

The loose divided cloud, and many-colour'd bow:

The crooked lightning darts around,

Its sovereign orders to fulfil;

The shooting flame obeys th' eternal will,

Launch'd from his hand, instructed where to kill.

Or rive the mountain oak, or blast the shelter'd ground.

Yet, pleas'd to bless, indulgent to supply,

He with a father's tender care,

Supports the numerous families

That people earth, and sea, and air.

From nature's giant race, th' enormous elephant,

Down to the insect worm and creeping ant

From th' eagle, sovereign of the sky,

To each inferior feather'd brood;

From crowns and purple majesty

To humble shepherds on the plains,

His hand unseen divides to all their food,

And the whole world of life sustains.