Tixall Poetry/Life

by unknown author

Life.

 

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I.
 While frantick winds with fury blow,
  And plough and shake the fickle main,
 The working billows swell, with dreadful noise they flow,
  To vales and hills they turn the liquid plain.
  Their oozy beds profoundest waters leave,
 As if the sea's proud brood, like earth's, would try
To extinguish and confound the glories of the sky:
  Their bold gigantic heads they proudly heave;
    O'er mountains rival mountains soar,
    And foam and rave with horrid roar:
But soon each following surge its leading surge controuls,
 Successively pushed on the fluid mountain rowls,
  And dashed and spent dies on the shoar;
 Buried and lost in the universal tomb,
     Its vast maternal womb.

II.
    So in life's dubious course
 Wild fortune's shocks the soul disturb
    With their impetuous force:
  Swelled by its power, the passions rage;
  No bounds the soaring will can curb;
  Presumptuous minds dare Heaven engage!
 But crowding years push on and forwards drive,
    Till, hurried on, vain men arrive
    On death's inevitable coast,
Where all, dissolved to dust, in nature's mass are lost!

 

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