Make the extended Skies your Tomb,
Let Stars record your Worth:
Yet know, vain Mortals, all must die,
As Nature’s sickliest Birth.
Wou’d bounteous Heav’n indulge my Pray’r,
I frame a nobler Choice;
Nor, living, wish the pompous Pile,
Nor dead regret the Loss.
In thy fair Book of Life divine,
My God, inscribe my Name:
Then let it fill some humble Place,
Beneath the slaughter’d Lamb.
The Saints, while Ages roll away,
In endless Fame survive;
Their Glories, o’er the Wrongs of Time,
Greatly triumphant, live.
From: Hervey, James, Meditations Among theTombs. In a Letter to a Lady, 1746, J and J Rivington and J Leake:London and Bath, pp. 48-49.
(https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=1thbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA48)
Date: 1746
By: James Hervey (1714-1758)
From Troubles of The World 