Poetical Fragments from Ethel Churchill Volume III/Sorrows and Pleasures

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

CHAPTER XXXIV.

POVERTY.

It is an awful thing how we forget
The sacred ties that bind us each to each.
Our pleasures might admonish us, and say,
Tremble at that delight which is unshared;
Its selfishness must be its punishment.
All have their sorrows, and how strange it seems
They do not soften more the general heart:
Sorrows should be those universal links
That draw all life together.

Blanchard’s title is:

SORROWS AND PLEASURES

In The New York Mirror (10th March 1838), as Selfishness