DIDACTIC AND MORAL PIECES. MY MIDNIGHT MEDITATION. ILL-busied man! why should'st thou take such care To lengthen out thy life's short calendar? Each drooping season and each flower doth The beating of thy pulse (when thou art well) Covers alike deceased day and thee. cry, And all those weeping dews which nightly fall VOL. H. B Dr. King's Poems, p. 138. TIMES GO BY TURNS. THE lopped tree in time may grow again, The sea of Fortune doth not ever flow, ~ Her tides have equal times to come and go, No joy so great but runneth to an end, Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring, A chance may win that by mischance was lost, ROBERT SOUTHWELL. THE SEARCH AFTER FELICITY. THE wisest men that nature e'er could boast, That game, from squat, they term, Felicity: One digs to Pluto's throne, thinks there to find * Keenly they hunted, &c.] To this and the succeeding lines may with justice be applied what Dr. Warton has observed of some lines of Pope: "The metaphors in the succeeding lines, drawn from the fieldsports of setting and shooting, seem below the dignity of the subject." Essay on Pope, Vol. II. p. 124. |