Dost doubt my warning song? Then doubt the sun gives light, Doubt truth to teach thee wrong, And wrong alone as right; And live as lives the knave, Intrigue's deceiving guest; Be tyrant, or be slave, As suits thy ends the best.
Or pause amid thy toils For visions won and lost, And count the fancied spoils, If eer they quit the cost: And if they still possess Thy mind, as worthy things, Plat straws with bedlam Bess, And call them diamond rings.
Thy folly's past advice, Thy heart's already won, Thy fall's above all price, So go, and be undone; For all who thus prefer The seeming great for small Shall make wine vinegar, And sweetest honey gall.
Wouldst heed the truths I sing, To profit wherewithal, Clip folly's wanton wing, And keep her within call. I've little else to give, What thou canst easy try; The lesson how to live Is but to learn to die.
Why should man's high aspiring mind Burn in him with so proud a breath, When all his haughty views can find In this world yields to death? The fair, the brave, the vain, the wise, The rich, the poor, the great, and small, Are each but worm's anatomies To strew his quiet hall.
Power may make many earthly gods, Where gold and bribery's guilt prevails, But death's unwelcome, honest odds Kick o'er the unequal scales. The flattered great may clamours raise Of power, and their own weakness hide, But death shall find unlooked-for ways To end the farce of pride,
An arrow hurtled eer so high, From een a giant's sinewy strength, In Time's untraced eternity Goes but a pigmy length; Nay, whirring from the tortured string, With all its pomp of hurried flight, Tis by the skylark's little wing Outmeasured in its height.
Just so man's boasted strength and power Shall fade before death's lightest stroke, Laid lower than the meanest flower, Whose pride oer-topt the oak; And he who, like a blighting blast, Dispeopled worlds with war's alarms Shall be himself destroyed at last By poor despised worms.
Tyrants in vain their powers secure, And awe slaves' murmurs with a frown, For unawed death at last is sure To sap the babels down. A stone thrown upward to the sky Will quickly meet the ground agen; So men-gods of earth's vanity Shall drop at last to men;