Page:The Art of Preserving Health - A Poem in Four Books.djvu/51

Far in the horrid realms of winter, where
Th' establish'd ocean heaps a monstrous waste
Of shining rocks and mountains to the pole;
There lives a hardy race, whose plainest wants
305Relentless earth, their cruel step-mother,
Regards not.On the waste of iron fields,
Untam'd, untractable, no harvests wave:
Pomona hates them, and the clownish God
Who tends the garden. In this frozen world
310Such cooling gifts were vain: a fitter meal
Is earn'd with ease; for here the fruitful spawn
Of Ocean swarms, and heaps their genial board
With generous fare and luxury profuse.
These are their bread, the only bread they know;
315These, and their willing slave the deer, that crops
The shrubby herbage on their meager hills.
Girt by the burning zone, not thus the south
Her swarthy sons, in either Ind, maintains: