Tixall Poetry/On Melancholy
On Melancholy.
Stand off, physician! let me frolickWith my humour melancholick.'Tis pleasure—it is pain likewise;Tis hell, and yet a paradise.Tis white and black,—'tis all uponChecker'd imagination.Tis an odd conceited theam;'Tis nature's rambling idle dream;Her cheating optick-glass, which lies,Falsely abstracts and multiplies.
The man of Rhodes, whose stature wasNine hundred camels' load of brass,This mighty Phœbus can't compareWith the melancholy I bear, In hands, feet, nose—fancy makes himBigger by far in every limb.
Another wasteful humour straightBrings him down to a half ounce weight,Then, like some bird, (a pretty folly!)Flies aloft, wing'd with melancholy!He's air, or some thin exhalationNext degree to annihilation.
'Tis thraldom, freedom, 'tis expressGood company, and loneliness;It laughs, and cries, all in one breath;'Tis wealth or want, 'tis life or death.A Bedlam-trance, 'tis what you will,'Tis as you'd have it, well or ill.A fickle contradicting mood,Arising from distempered blood.
Stand off, physician I 'tis, I'm sure,As a disease, so its own cure.