| |
| IS it to me, this sad lamenting strain? | |
| Are heaven’s choicest gifts bestowed in vain? | |
| A plenteous fortune, and a beauteous bride, | |
| Your love rewarded, gratify’d your pride: | |
| Yet leaving her—’tis me that you pursue | 5 |
| Without one single charm, but being new. | |
| How vile is man! how I detest their ways | |
| Of artful falsehood, and designing praise! | |
| Tasteless, an easy happiness you slight, | |
| Ruin your joy, and mischief your delight, | 10 |
| Why should poor pug (the mimic of your kind) | |
| Wear a rough chain, and be to box confin’d? | |
| Some cup, perhaps, he breaks, or tears a fan | |
| While roves unpunish’d the destroyer, man. | |
| Not bound by vows, and unrestrain’d by shame, | 15 |
| In sport you break the heart, and rend the fame. | |
| Not that your art can be successful here, | |
| Th’ already plunder’d need no robber fear: | |
| Nor sighs, nor charms, nor flatteries can move, | |
| Too well secur’d against a second love. | 20 |
| Once, and but once, that devil charm’d my mind; | |
| To reason deaf, to observation blind; | |
| I idly hop’d (what cannot love persuade?) | |
| My fondness equal’d, and my love repaid: | |
| Slow to distrust, and willing to believe, | 25 |
| Long hush’d my doubts, and did myself deceive; | |
| But oh! too soon—this tale would ever last; | |
| Sleep, sleep my wrongs, and let me think them past. | |
| For you, who mourn with counterfeited grief, | |
| And ask so boldly like a begging thief, | 30 |
| May soon some other nymph inflict the pain, | |
| You know so well with cruel art to feign. | |
| Though long you sported with Dan Cupid’s dart, | |
| You may see eyes, and you may feel a heart. | |
| So the brisk wits, who stop the evening coach, | 35 |
| Laugh at the fear which follows their approach; | |
| With idle mirth, and haughty scorn despise | |
| The passenger’s pale cheek and staring eyes: | |
| But seiz’d by Justice, find a fright no jest, | |
| And all the terror doubled in their breast. | 40 |
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