The Adamus exul of Grotius; or The Prototype of Paradise Lost — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Satan. A TRAGEDY.—ACT IV. 31. But thou, mysterious one, whose mental power Seems conversant with wonders, canst thou-tell. What hidden virtues in this tree reside ? Its very name may teach thee. Is it not The immortal, the inexplicable bliss Of knowledge, perfect knowledge? How divine To know all good and evil; to discern All mysteries, like a god, in this new world ! Evil is only evil when unknown ; Known, it refines to good. What happiness, What intellectual rapture, to compel Into one gorgeous focus all the charms Of knowledge, elsewhere scattered, vague, confused ! By this keen sight to make the universe Transparent as fine ether; by this vision, To see all causes, all effects conjoined In their superb complexity! O Queen Of Earth! say, is it not the chiefest good To know all godlike truth, all evil lies, So as to mock deception, and deride The assaults of demon tempters ? Tothe mind This world is but one glittering mirror, which Reflects its swift ideas, and refines And multiplies with Iris-tinctured hues. Is not the height of strong intelligence Thus to anatomise all things, and from all Educe new powers occult? The more it finds More earnestly it seeks, and spurns at rest— That empty, pitiful calmness of content. It tramples with ambition-wingéd feet The low, base boundaries of mortality, Burns to know more, and bursts the bars of fate, And death itself, to explain the august unknown. All that it has is nothing to the intense Glorious concupiscence of all it wants— Always the greater share. One God there is, Whose mind, without this enterprise of toil, Can form its own ideas, and vindicate, - None daring him to question. Thus He knows, Or thinks He knows, all arts and sciences. Who shall disprove him by the test of fact ? He stands alone. To other thinking souls, Either he grants not power to apprehend The fair discourse of reason, or he grants This boon of liberal thought, all manacled, Halt, withered, blind, perplexed with chafing doubts, Haggard with fears, hoodwinked from heaven's free light, Masked in incomprehensibility. _ By the same words in which he promises This blessing, in postponed futurity, COL @ DOO <S (c@