My sinking spirits now supplies
With cordials in her hands and eyes :ʊ
Now with a soft and silent tread/
Unheard she moves about my bed.
I see her taste each nauseous draught,
And so obligingly am caught;//
I bless the hand from whence they came,
Nor dare distort my face for shame.
Best pattern of true friends! beware;
You pay too dearly for your care,
If, while your tenderness secures
My life, it must endanger yours;
For such a fool was never found,
Who pull'd a palace to the ground,
Only to have the ruins made
Materials for a house decay'd.
ON HIS BIRTH-DAY, NOV. 30, 1721.
ST. PATRICK'S Dean, your country's pride,
My early and my only guide,
Let me among the rest attend,
Your pupil and your humble friend,
To celebrate in female strains
The day that paid your mother's pains;
Descend to take that tribute due
In gratitude alone to you.
When men began to call me fair,
You interposed your timely care:
You early taught me to despise
The ogling of a coxcomb's eyes;
Show'd where my judgment was misplaced;
Refined my fancy and my taste.
Behold that beauty just decay'd,
Invoking art to nature's aid:
Forsook by her admiring train,
She spreads her tatter'd nets in vain ;
Short was her part upon the stage;
Went smoothly on for half a page;
Her bloom was gone, she wanted art,
As the scene changed, to change her part;
She, whom no lover could resist,
Before the second act was hiss'd.
Such is the fate of female race
With no endowments but a face;
Before the thirtieth year of life,
A maid forlorn or hated wife.
Stella to you, her tutor, owes
That she has ne'er resembled those :
Nor was a burden to mankind
With half her course of years behind.
You taught how I might youth prolong,
By knowing what was right and wrong;
How from my heart to bring supplies
Of lustre to my fading eyes;
How soon a beauteous mind repairs
The loss of changed or falling hairs;
How wit and virtue from within
Send out a smoothness o'er the skin:
Your lectures could my fancy fix,
And I can please at thirty-six.
The sight of Chloe at fifteen,
Coquetting, gives not me the spleen;
The idol now of every fool
Till time shall make their passions cool;
Then tumbling down Time's steepy hill,
While Stella holds her station still.
O! turn your precepts into laws,
Redeem the women's ruin'd cause,
Retrieve lost empire to our sex,
That men may bow their rebel necks.
Long be the day that gave you birth
Sacred to friendship, wit, and mirth;
Late dying may you cast a shred
Of your rich mantle o'er my head d;
To bear with dignity my sorrow,
One day alone, then die to-morrow.
ON HER BIRTH-DAY, 1721-2.
WHILE, Stella, to your lasting praise
The Muse her annual tribute pays,
While I assign myself a task
Which you expect, but scorn to ask;
If I perform this task with pain,
Let me of partial fate complain ;
You every year the debt enlarge,
grow less equal to the charge:
In you each virtue brighter shines,
But my poetic vein declines;
My harp will soon in vain be strung,
And all your virtues left unsung.
For none among the upstart race
Of poets dare assume my place;
Your worth will be to them unknown,
They must have Stellas of their own;
And thus, my stock of wit decay'd,
I dying leave the debt unpaid,
Unless Delany as my heir,
Will answer for the whole arrear.
ON THE GREAT BURIED BOTTLE.
AMPHORA, quæ mæstum linquis, lætumque revises Arentem dominum, sit tibi terra levis.
Tu quoque depositum serves, neve opprime,
Amphora non meruit tam pretiosa mori.
Hoc tumulata jacet proles Lenæa sepulchro, Immortale genus, nec peritura jacet;
Quin oritura iterum, matris concreditur alvo: Bis natum referunt te quoque, Bacche Pater.
A GREAT BOTTLE OF WINE, LONG BURIED,
BEING THAT DAY DUG UP.
RESOLVED my annual verse to pay,
By duty bound, on Stella's day,
Furnish'd with paper, pens, and ink,
I gravely sat me down to think :
I bit my nails, and scratch'd my head,
But found my wit and fancy fled :
Or if, with more than usual pain,
A thought came slowly from my brain,
It cost me Lord knows how much time
To shape it into sense and rhyme:
And, what was yet a greater curse,
Long thinking made my fancy worse.
Forsaken by th' inspiring Nine,
I waited at Apollo's shrine:
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