Or as a watch by night, that course doth keep,
And goes and comes unware to them that sleep.
Thou carriest man away as with a tide
Then down swim all his thoughts that mounted high,
Much like a mocking dream that will not bide
But flies before the sight of waking eye,
Or as the grass that cannot term obtain
To see the summer come about again.
At morning fair, it musters on the ground;
At even it is cut down and laid along ;
And though it spared were and favour found,
The weather should perform the mower's wrong;
Thus hast thou hanged our life on brittle pins,
To let us know it will not bear our sins.
Teach us, O Lord, to number well our days,
Thereby our hearts to wisdom to apply;
For that which guides man best in all his ways
Is meditation of mortality:
This bubble light, this vapour of our breath,
Teach us to consecrate to hour of death.
Return unto us, Lord, and balance now
With days of joy our days of misery:
Help us right soon, our knees to Thee we bow,
Depending wholly on Thy clemency:
Then shall Thy servants, both with heart and voice,
All the days of their life in Thee rejoice.
He that to such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers, nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
What a fair seat hath he from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey.
And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil,
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat
On flesh and blood, where honour, power, renown,
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil,
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet
As frailty doth, and only great doth seem
To little minds, who do it so esteem.
Although his heart so near allied to earth,
Cannot but pity the perplexed state
Of troublous and distressed mortality
That thus make way to the repeated birth
Of their own sorrows, and so still beget
Affliction upon imbecility;
Yet seeing thus the course of things must run,
He looks thereon, not strange, but as foredone.
And while distraught ambition compasses
And is incompassed, whilst as craft deceives
And is deceived, whilst man doth ransack man
And builds on blood, and rises by distress,
And the inheritance of desolation leaves
To great expecting hopes, he looks thereon,
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety.
Knowing the heart of man is set to be
The centre of the world, about the which
Those revolutions of disturbances
Still rule, where all th' aspects of misery
Predominate, whose strong effects are such
As he must bear, being powerless to redress;
And that unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
And how turmoiled are they that level lie
With earth, and cannot lift themselves from thence;
That never are at peace with their desires,
But work beyond their years, and even deny
Dotage her rest, and hardly will dispense
With death; that when ability expires
Desire still lives: so much delight they have
To carry toil and travel to the grave.
Whose ends we see, and what is even the best
They reach unto when they have cast the sum
And reckonings of their glory, and we know
This floating life hath but one port of rest,
A heart prepared, that fears no ill to come :
And that man's greatness rests but in his show,
The best of all whose days consumed are
Either in war, or peace conceiving war.
This gladsome concord of a well-tuned mind
Hath been so set by that all-working Hand
Of Heaven, that though the world hath done his worst
To put it out by discords most unkind,
Yet doth it still in perfect union stand
With God and man, nor ever will be forced
From that most sweet accord, but still agree,
Equal in fortune's inequality.
O HAPPY, golden age!
Not for that rivers ran
With streams of milk, and honey dropped from trees;
Not that the earth did gage
Unto the husbandman
Her voluntary fruits, free without fees;
Not for no cold did freeze,
Nor any cloud beguile,
Th' eternal flowering spring,
Wherein lived everything,
And whereon th' heavens perpetually did smile,
Not for no ship had brought
From foreign shores, or wars or wares ill sought.
But only for that name,
That idle name of wind,
That idol of deceit, that empty sound,
Called Selfishness, which came
The tyrant of the mind,
And so torments our nature without ground,
Was not yet sadly found;
Nor yet sad grief imparted,
Amidst the sweet delights,
Of joyful, happy wights.
Nor were his hard laws known to the free-born
But golden laws like these
Which Nature wrote. Man sought his God to please.
He who hath never warr'd with misery,
Nor ever tugged with fortune and distress,
Hath had n'occasion nor no field to try
The strength and forces of his worthiness:
Those parts of judgment which felicity
Keeps as concealed, affliction must express;
And only men show their abilities,
And what they are, in their extremities.
The world had never taken so full note
Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone,
And only thy affliction hath begot
More fame than thy best fortunes could have done;
For ever by adversitie are wrought
The greatest works of admiration ;
And all the fair examples of renown,
Out of distress and misery are grown.
Not to be unhappy is unhappiness,
And misery not to have known misery,
For the best way unto discretion, is
The way that leads us by adversity.
And men are better shown what is amiss,
By th' expert finger of calamity,
Than they can be with all that fortune brings,
Who never shows them the true face of things.
It is not but the tempest that doth shew
The sea-man's cunning; but the field that tries
The captaines courage: and we come to know
Best what men are in their worst jeopardies.
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