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These yield, and these to sudden overthrow;
Their virtue, service, happiness, and state
Expire; and Nature's pleasant robe of green,
Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps
Their monuments and their memory. The vast Frame
Of social nature changes evermore
Her organs and her members, with decay
Restless, and restless generation, powers
And functions dying and produced at need,—
And by this law the mighty Whole subsists:
With an ascent and progress in the main;
Yet oh! how disproportioned to the hopes
And expectations of self-flattering minds!
—The courteous Knight, whose bones are here interred,
Lived in an age conspicuous as our own
For strife and ferment in the minds of men;
Whence alteration, in the forms of things,
Various and vast. A memorable age!
Which did to him assign a pensive lot,
—To linger mid the last of those bright Clouds,
That, on the steady breeze of honour, sailed
In long procession calm and beautiful.
