The ninth hieroglyphic will put you in mind of the poems that are squeezed or stretched into the form of axes, altars, and wings——but if you will attend to the matter, and not the form, you will find it excellent——to write this properly requires some care.
Behold
How short a span
Was long enough of old
To measure out the life of man;
In those well-temper’d days, his time was then
Survey’d, cast up, and found but threescore years and ten!Alas!
And what is that?
They come, and slide, and pass,
Before my pen can tell thee what.
The posts of Time are swift, which having run
Their sev’n short stages o’er, their short-liv’d task is done.Our days
Begun, we lend
To sleep, to antick plays
And toys, until the first stage end:
12 waining moons, twice 5 times told, we give
To unrecover’d loss: we rather breathe than live.We spend
A ten years breath
Before we apprehend
What ’tis to live, or fear a Death:
Our childish dreams are fill’d with painted joys
Which please our sense awhile, and waking prove but toys!How vain
How wretched is
Poor man, that doth remain
A slave to such a state as this!
His days are short, at longest; few at most;
They are but bad at best; yet lavish’d out, or lost.They be
The secret springs
That make our minutes flee
On wheels more swift than eagle’s wings!
Our Life’s a clock, and ev’ry gasp of breath
Breathes forth a warning grief, till Time shall strike a Death!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