340 CONSOLATIONS OF SOLITUDE
Lo, where yon once proud temples crumbling stand,
In ruined beauty smiling o'er the land,
Whose mouldering shafts, with green vines gayly decked,
Even yet amaze, tottering, but still erect,
While fragment poised on fragment high in air
The grass-crowned capitals can scarcely bear,
Soon hurled to ruin, all in dust shall lie,
And lastly Nature's self, like Art, must die.
There's nothing but is destined to decay ;
Time, thine old servant, forced by thee to obey.
Mows with reluctant scythe all his own works away.
Yet spare awhile yon stone and flowery bed, Where Love with anxious hand adorns the dead ; And spare yon obelisk, o'ergrown with weeds. Which tells the inspiring tale of virtuous deeds ; And save yon vine-clad oak from wintry blast. Sacred so long to friendship in the past. Whose whispering boughs oft sighed to song and tale, Ere at Death's touch the tuneful lips grew pale. Seize first those towers that, raised in air sublime, Tell of a long antiquity of crime. O, vain to arrest thee, since thy power unbounded All undermines, however firmly grounded : All in one common wreck shall be confounded.
Yet from thy boundless charnel house once more Time shall his buried Beautiful restore. Thou also hast a master ; pitying Fate Permits thee not all good to annihilate ; The just man's fame some fragrance leaves behind, That with each age grows sweeter to mankind ; And from the seeds of loveliness the earth, Year after year, new beauty brings to birth ; The rough rocks into temples rise once more ;
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