AThe Anniverse AN ELEGY

So soon grown old! hast thou been six years dead?

Poor earth, once by my Love inhabited!

And must I live to calculate the time

To which thy blooming youth could never climbe,

But fell in the ascent! yet have not I

Studi'd enough thy losses history.

How happy were mankind if Death's strict lawes

Consum'd our lamentations like the cause!

Or that our grief turning to dust might end

With the dissolved body of a friend!

But sacred Heaven! O how just thou art

In stamping deaths impression on that heart

Which through thy favours would grow insolent,

Were it not physick't by sharp discontent.

If then it stand resolv'd in thy decree

That still I must doom'd to a Desart be

Sprung out of my lone thoughts, which know no path

But what my own misfortune beaten hath:

If thou wilt bind me living to a coarse,

And I must slowly waste; I then of force

Stoop to thy great appointment, and obey

That will which nought avail me to gainsay.

For whil'st in sorrowes Maze I wander on,

I do but follow lifes vocation.

Sure we were made to grieve: at our first birth

With cries we took possession of the earth;

And though the lucky man reputed be

Fortunes adopted son, yet onely he

Is Natures true born child, who summes his years

(Like me) with no Arithmetick but tears.