One may learn "her Lesson from within" and "There […] read the Characters imprest / Upon the Mind of ev'ry human Breast,-- / The native Laws prescrib'd to every Soul, / And Love, the One Fulfiller of the Whole."

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)


Date
1773, 1894-1895
Metaphor
One may learn "her Lesson from within" and "There […] read the Characters imprest / Upon the Mind of ev'ry human Breast,-- / The native Laws prescrib'd to every Soul, / And Love, the One Fulfiller of the Whole."
Metaphor in Context
But she had that which all the Force of Art
Could neither give nor take away,--an Heart,
An honest, humble, well-disposèd Will,
The true Capacity for higher Skill
Than what the World with all its learnèd Din
Could teach. She learn'd her Lesson from within,--
Plain, single Lesson of essential Kind:
The Love of God's Pure Presence in her Mind.
Her artless, innocent, attentive Thought
Was at the Source of all True Knowledge taught.
There she could read the Characters imprest
Upon the Mind of ev'ry human Breast,--
The native Laws prescrib'd to ev'ry Soul,
And Love, the One Fulfiller of the Whole.
Provenance
Searching in HDIS (Poetry)
Citation
2 entries in ESTC (1773).

See Miscellaneous Poems, by John Byrom, M.A. F.R.S. sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Inventor of the Universal English Short-Hand. In Two Volumes. (Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, 1773). <Link to ESTC><Link to Google Books> [Variant title: "Reflections on the Foregoing Account," see vol. 2]

Text from The Poems of John Byrom, ed. Adolphus William Ward, 2 vols. (Manchester: Printed for The Chetham Society, 1894-1895).
Date of Entry
04/20/2005

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.