Upon a Poet’s solitude;
Whose saddest fortune was to fly
In a Poet’s lamp, and cheated die.
Ah! punishment to rashness due,
How certain! and how direful too!
The silly Moth thus seeking light
Is overwhelmed in shades of night;
So Youth pursuing Pleasure’s ray
O’ertakes grim Death upon the way!”
The Latin of the epitaph is of that obvious kind which an American college boy is likely to write, and there is really more distinction in Kellogg’s translation than in the original.