_How soon_ Our new-born light Attains to full-ag’d noon! And this, how soon to grey-hair’d night! We spring, we bud, we blossom and we blast E’er we can count our days, our days they flee so fast!
_They end_ When scarce begun; And e’er we apprehend That we begin to live, our life is done: Man count thy days; and if they fly too fast For thy dull thoughts to count, count ev’ry day the last.
Methinks Quarles’s ghost is at my elbow, which will not be appeased unless I remark that the first lines of each stanza make a verse, being the text on which the poem is a comment.
_Behold, alas! our days we spend; How vain they be, how soon they end!_
This is a kind of false wit once much in request. Jarvis, the translator of Don Quixote, calls it _glossing_—upon what authority I know not. In the first chapter of the second book of the second volume may be found a text and gloss—with this difference from Quarles’s, that the text is introduced at the end of the stanza and not at the beginning.
It is impossible to avoid smiling at the pains he must have taken to preserve the form of the stanza—in the third he is obliged to have the assistance of figures, or his line would have been too long; and after all his trouble there must be some for the reader before he has calculated how much “12 moons, twice 5 times told,” are——in the rest, to say the truth, it is not so apparent. If this pyramidical stanza prevents you from attending to the poetry, it is easily put in another—of the two first lines make one; and the false wit immediately vanishes.—I hope Quarles’s ghost vanished before I proposed the alteration.
I have, like a prudent caterer, reserved the best thing for the last. It is the twelfth emblem of the third book. The subject of the print is a figure trying to escape from the Divine vengeance which is pursuing in thunders: the motto——_O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou wouldst keep me in secret until thy wrath be past!_ Upon this hint he has produced the following excellent poem.
Ah! whither shall I fly? what path untrod Shall I seek out to ’scape the flaming rod Of my offended, of my angry God?
Where shall I sojourn? what kind sea will hide My head from thunder? where shall I abide, Until his flames be quench’d or laid aside?