The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore Author:Thomas Moore Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a glimpse is thus given to our eyes, go, wander, in your orb, through the boundless heaven, nor ever let a thought of this perishable world come to mingle its dr... more »oss with your divine nature, or allure you down earthward to that mortal fall by which spirits, no less bright and admirable, have been ruined !" A pause ensued, during which, still under the influence of wonder, I sent my fancy wandering after the inhabitants of that orb — almost wishing myself credulous enough to believe in a heaven, of which creatures, so much like those I had worshipped on earth, were inmates. At length, the Priest, with a mournful sigh at the sad contrast he was about to draw between the happy spirits we had just seen and the fallen ones of earth, resumed again his melancholy History of the Soul. Tracing it gradually from the first moment of earthward desire to its final eclipse in the shadows of this world, he dwelt upon every stage of its darkening descent, with a pathos that sent In the original construction of this work, there was an episode introduced here (which I have since published in a more extended form), illustrating the doctrine of the fall of the soul by the Oriental fable of the Loves of the Angels. sadness into the very depths of the heart. The first downward look of the Spirit towards earth—the tremble of her wings on the edge of Heaven—the giddy slide, at length, down that fatal descent, and the Lethean cup, midway in the sky, of which when she has once tasted, Heaven is forgot—through all these gradations he traced mournfully her fall, to that last stage of darkness, when, wholly immersed in this world, her celestial nature becomes changed, she no longer can rise above earth, nor even remember her former home, except by glimpses so vague, that, at length, mistaking for ...« less