Am I a debtor? hast thou ever heard

Whence come the gifts which are on me conferr'd?
My lavish fruit a thousand vallies fills,

And mine the herds that graze a thousand hills:
Earth, sea, and air, all Nature is my own,

And stars and sun are dust beneath my throne;
And dar'st thou with the world's great Father vie,
Thou, who dost tremble at my creature's eye?

At full my huge Leviathan shall rise,

Boast all his strength, and spread his wondrous size :
Who, great in arms, e'er stript his shining mail,
Or crown'd his triumph with a single scale?
Whose heart sustains him to draw near? Behold
Destruction yawns ;* his spacious jaws unfold,
And, marshall'd round the wide expanse, disclose
Teeth edg'd with death, and crowding rows on rows:
What hideous fangs on either side arise!

And what a deep abyss between them lies!

is, when sated with fish, to come ashore and sleep among the reeds.

* The crocodile's mouth is exceeding wide. When he gapes, says Pliny, sit totum os. Martial says to his old woman,

Cum comparata rictibus tuis ora
Niliacus habet crocodilus augusta.

So that the expression there is barely just.

Mete with thy lance, and with thy plumbet sound,
The one how long, the other how profound!

His bulk is charg'd with such a furious soul,
That clouds of smoke from his spread nostrils roll
As from a furnace; and, when rous'd his ire,
Fate issues from his jaws in streams of fire.*
The rage of tempests, and the roar of seas,
Thy terror, this thy great superior please;
Strength on his ample shoulder sits in state;
His well join'd limbs are dreadfully complete;
His flakes of solid flesh are slow to part;

As steel his nerves, as adamant his heart.
When, late awak'd, he rears him from the floods,
And stretching forth his stature to the clouds,

*This too is nearer truth than at first view may be imagined. The crocodile, say the naturalists, lying long under water, and being there forced to hold its breath, when it emerges, the breath long repressed is hot, and bursts out so violently, that it resembles fire and smoke. The horse suppresses not his breath by any means so long, neither is he so fierce and animated; yet the most correct of poets ventures to use the same metaphor concerning him.

Collectumque premens volvit sub naribus ignem. By this and the foregoing note, I would caution against a false opinion of the Eastern boldness, from passages in them ill understood.

Writhes in the sun aloft his scaly height,
And strikes the distant hills with transient light,
Far round are fatal damps of terror spread,
The mighty fear, nor blush to own their dread.
Large is his front; and when his burnish'd eyes
Lift their broad lids, the morning seems to rise.*

In vain may death in various shapes invade,
The swift-wing'd arrow, the descending blade;
His naked breast their impotence defies;
The dart rebounds, the brittle faulchion flies.
Shut in himself, the war without he hears,
Safe in the tempest of their rattling spears;
The cumber'd strand their wasted vollies strow;
His sport the rage and labour of the foe.

His pastimes like a caldron boil the flood,
And blacken ocean with a rising mud;

* His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. I think this gives us as great an image of the thing it would express as can enter the thought of man. It is not improbable that the Egyptians stole their hieroglyphic for the morning, which is the crocodile's eye, from this passage, though no commentator I have seen mentions it. It is easy to conceive how the Egyptians should be both readers and admirers of the writings of Moses, whom I suppose the author of this poem.

I have observed already that three or four of the creatures here described are Egyptian; the two last

The billows feel him as he works his way,
His hoary footsteps shine along the sea;

The foam high-wrought, with white divides the green,
And distant sailors point where death has been.
His like earth bears not on her spacious face;
Alone in nature stands his dauntless race,
For utter ignorance of fear renown'd:
In wrath he rolls his baleful eye around;
Makes ev'ry swoln disdainful heart subside,
And holds dominion o'er the sons of Pride.
Then the Chaldean eas'd his lab'ring breast,
With full conviction of his crime oppress'd.

are notoriously so; they are the river-horse and the crocodile, those celebrated inhabitants of the Nile; and on these two it is that our author chiefly dwells. It would have been expected from an author more remote from that river than Moses, in a catalogue of creatures produced to magnify their Creator, to have dwelt on the two largest works of his hand, viz. the elephant and the whale. This is so natural an expectation, that some commentators have rendered bohemoth and leviathan the elephant and whale, though the descriptions in our author will not admit of it; but Moses being, as we may well suppose, under an immediate terror of the hippopotamus and crocodile, from their daily mischiefs and ravages around him, it is very accountable why he should permit them to take place.

"Thou canst accomplish all things, Lord of might! “And ev'ry thought is naked to thy sight: "But, oh! thy ways are wonderful, and lie "Beyond the deepest reach of mortal eye. "Oft' have I heard of thine Almighty pow'r, "But never saw thee till this dreadful hour. "O'erwhelm'd with shame, the Lord of life I see, "Abhor myself, and give my soul to thee;

'Nor shall my weakness tempt thine anger more : "Man is not made to question, but adore.”