Ben. Johnson's poems, elegies, paradoxes, and sonnets

The Anniverse. AN ELEGY.

SO soon grown old! hast thou been six years dead▪ Poor earth, once by my Love inhabited! And must I live to calculate the time To which thy blooming youth could never climbe, But fell in the ascent! yet have not I Studi'd enough thy losses history.

How happy were mankind if Death's strict lawes Consum'd our lamentations like the cause! Or that our grief turning to dust might end With the dissolved body of a friend!

But sacred Heaven! O how just thou art In stamping deaths impression on that heart Which through thy favours would grow insolent, Were it not physick't by sharp discontent. If then it stand resolv'd in thy decree That still I must doom'd to a Desart be Sprung out of my lone thoughts, which know no path But what my own misfortune beaten hath:

If thou wilt bind me living to a coarse, And I must slowly waste; I then of force Stoop to thy great appointment, and obey That will which nought avail me to gainsay.

For whil'st in sorrowes Maze I wander on, I do but follow lifes vocation. Sure we were made to grieve: at our first birth With cries we took possession of the earth; And though the lucky man reputed be Fortunes adopted son, yet onely he Is Natures true born child, who summes his years (Like me) with no Arithmetick but tears.