The Adamus exul of Grotius; or The Prototype of Paradise Lost — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

44 Eve. Adam. Eve. ADAMUS EXUL. Alas, my spouse! why will you not begin To act less like the jibbering maniac, Whose words are imprecations and despair ? If vengeance is decreed, why come it must, And we must bear it gallantly ; and so Either destroy, or by it be destroyed. Ay, come it must; and better it come now Than keep my agonising heart all racked In ecstasy of this suspense. Thou Earth, Open at once thy hot and sulphurous womb, And, if thou canst, O make us what we were, Thy dust of dissolution. Or, if Hell May best agree with guiltiness, unbar, Ye flaming gates of Tartarus; for ne’er Did richer spoil, or nobler victims, greet The sable gulf where exiled demons dwell. O my loved lord! I pri’thee speak not so ; There is no sin repentance cannot cure. Adam. Alas! thou little knowest what sin is our’s ; Eve. Adam, What words can utter it, or what laments Atone the apostasy, wherein all law, Right, justice, mercy, faith, felicity, And peace all perished. Never more to us Shall joy return, or hope; eternal grief, Forever fresh, forever unfulfilled, Shall waste our cankered hearts. For we have left Our God; and God shall leave us to ourselves. O exquisite rebellion! thou most curst, And unforgiveable treachery. That free minds, Made but to serve their Maker, thus should strive To serve themselves, and thus themselves destroy By deadliest suicide. That the frank love Of sons to a dear father, should be locked In their own thankless bosoms, and become Infernal fire to blast them; so bowed down Beneath the pitiful brute, and the poor worm We trample. Hence, thou mad and blasphemous soul, Thou hast deserted God, thy Father :—now Desert thy vilified body, and at once Learn the whole mystery of the curse of death. Beware, rash man; thou dost but aggravate Thy grief and mine by these foul execrations. Well, and what then? Even now I taste of death, And of perdition—dying, perishing, - In my lost soul, ere yet I feel the sting That soon shall quite dissolve me, and consume To nothing this essential AmI not Accursed of God? And is not his stern doom COL @ DOO <S (c@