Stanzas: Occasioned by Lord Bellamont's, Lady Hay's, and Other Skeletons

To sleep in peace when life is fled,
Where shall our mouldering bones be laid--
What care can shun--(I ask with tears)
The shovels of succeeding years!

Some have maintained, when life is gone,
This frame no longer is our own:
Hence doctors to our tombs repair,
And seize death's slumbering victims there.

Alas! what griefs must Man endure!
Not even in forts he rests secure:--
Time dims the splendours of a crown,
And brings the loftiest rampart down.

The breath, once gone, no art recalls!
Away we haste to vaulted walls:
Some future whim inverts the plain,
And stars behold our bones again.

Those teeth, dear girls--so much your care--
(With which no ivory can compare)
Like these (that once were lady Hay's)
May serve the belles of future days.

Then take advice from yonder scull;
And, when the flames of life grow dull,
Leave not a tooth in either jaw,
Since dentists steal--and fear no law.

He, that would court a sound repose,
To barren hills and deserts goes:
Where busy hands admit no sun,
Where he may doze, 'till all is done.

Yet there, even there tho' slyly laid,
'Tis folly to defy the spade:
Posterity invades the hill,
And plants our relics where she will.

But O! forbear the rising sigh!
All care is past with them that die:
Jove gave, when they to fate resigned,
An opiate of the strongest kind:

Death is a sleep, that has no dreams:
In which all time a moment seems--
And skeletons perceive no pain
Till Nature bids them wake again.