Or:—
“Our father ate forbidden Fruit,
And from his glory fell;
And we his children thus were brought
To death, and near to hell.”
Or again:—
“There’s not a sin that we commit
Nor wicked word we say
But in thy dreadful book is writ
Against the judgment day.”
A child was not even allowed to wish for length of days. Poor little Elizabeth Raymond, who finished her sampler in 1789, in her eighth year, had to ask:—
“Lord give me wisdom to direct my ways
I beg not riches nor yet length of days
My life is a flower, the time it hath to last
Is mixed with frost and shook with every blast.”
A similar idea runs through the following:—
“Gay dainty flowers go simply to decay,
Poor wretched life’s short portion flies away;
We eat, we drink, we sleep, but lo anon
Old age steals on us never thought upon.”
Not less lugubrious is Esther Tabor’s sampler, who, in 1771, amidst charming surroundings of pots of roses and carnations, intersperses the lines:—
“Our days, alas, our mortal days
Are short and wretched too
Evil and few the patriarch says
And well the patriarch knew.”