| |
| THIS day, whate’er the Fates decree, | |
| Shall still be kept with joy by me. | |
| This day, then, let us not be told | |
| That you are sick, and I grown old; | |
| Nor think on our approaching ills, | 5 |
| And talk of spectacles and pills. | |
| To-morrow will be time enough | |
| To hear such mortifying stuff. | |
| Yet, since from reason may be brought | |
| A better and more pleasing thought, | 10 |
| Which can in spite of all decays | |
| Support a few remaining days, | |
| From not the gravest of divines | |
| Accept for once some serious lines. | |
| Although we now can form no more | 15 |
| Long schemes of life, as heretofore, | |
| Yet you, while time is running fast, | |
| Can look with joy on what is past. | |
| Were future happiness and pain | |
| A mere contrivance of the brain; | 20 |
| As atheists argue, to entice | |
| And fit their proselytes for vice | |
| (The only comfort they propose, | |
| To have companions in their woes)— | |
| Grant this the case, yet sure ’tis hard | 25 |
| That virtue, styled its own reward, | |
| And by all sages understood | |
| To be the chief of human good, | |
| Should acting die, nor leave behind | |
| Some lasting pleasure in the mind, | 30 |
| Which, by remembrance, will assuage | |
| Grief, sickness, poverty, and age; | |
| And strongly shoot a radiant dart | |
| To shine through life’s declining part. | |
| Say, Stella, feel you no content, | 35 |
| Reflecting on a life well spent? | |
| Your skilful hand employed to save | |
| Despairing wretches from the grave, | |
| And then supporting with your store | |
| Those whom you dragged from death before: | 40 |
| So Providence on mortals waits, | |
| Preserving what it first creates. | |
| Your gen’rous boldness to defend | |
| An innocent and absent friend; | |
| That courage which can make you just | 45 |
| To merit humbled in the dust; | |
| The detestation you express | |
| For vice in all its glittering dress; | |
| That patience under tort’ring pain, | |
| Where stubborn Stoics would complain; | 50 |
| Must these like empty shadows pass, | |
| Or forms reflected from a glass, | |
| Or mere chimæras in the mind, | |
| That fly, and leave no marks behind? | |
| Does not the body thrive and grow | 55 |
| By food of twenty years ago? | |
| And, had it not been still supplied, | |
| It must a thousand times have died; | |
| Then who with reason can maintain | |
| That no effects of food remain? | 60 |
| And is not virtue in mankind | |
| The nutriment that feeds the mind, | |
| Upheld by each good action past, | |
| And still continued by the last? | |
| Then who with reason can pretend | 65 |
| That all effects of virtue end? | |
| Believe me, Stella, when you show | |
| That true contempt for things below, | |
| Nor prize your life for other ends | |
| Than merely to oblige your friends, | 70 |
| Your former actions claim their part, | |
| And join to fortify your heart: | |
| For Virtue, in her daily race, | |
| Like Janus, bears a double face; | |
| Looks back with joy where she has gone, | 75 |
| And therefore goes with courage on. | |
| She at your sickly couch will wait, | |
| And guide you to a better state. | |
| O then, whatever Heaven intends, | |
| Take pity on your pitying friends! | 80 |
| Nor let your ills affect your mind | |
| To fancy they can be unkind. | |
| Me, surely me, you ought to spare, | |
| Who gladly would your suff’ring share, | |
| Or give my scrap of life to you, | 85 |
| And think it far beneath your due; | |
| You, to whose care so oft I owe | |
| That I’m alive to tell you so. | |
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