EPITAPH ON A FREE BUT TAME REDBREAST.
These are not dewdrops, these are tears,
And tears by Sally shed,
For absent Robin, who she fears,
With too much cause, is dead.
One morn he came not to her hand
As he was wont to come,
And, on her finger perch’d, to stand
Picking his breakfast crumb.
Alarm’d, she called him, and perplex’d,
She sought him, but in vain;
That day he came not, nor the next,
Nor ever came again.
She therefore raised him here a tomb,
Though where he fell, or how,
None knows, so secret was his doom,
Nor where he moulders now.
Had half a score of coxcombs died
In social Robin’s stead,
Poor Sally’s tears had soon been dried
Or haply never shed.
But Bob was neither rudely bold
Nor spiritlessly tame;
Nor was, like theirs, his bosom cold,
But always in a flame.
—William Cowper.