Ye foolish nurslings of the summer air! 
  These gentle tunes and whining songs forbear,
  Your trees and whispering breeze, your grove and love,
  Your Cupid’s quiver, and his mother’s dove;
  Let bards to business bend their vigorous wing,
  And sing but seldom, if they love to sing:  70
  Else, when the flowerets of the season fail,
  And this your ferny shade forsakes the vale,
  Though one would save ye, not one grain of wheat
  Should pay such songster’s idling at my gate.

   He ceased:  the flies, incorrigibly vain,
  Heard the mayor’s speech, and fell to sing again.

* * * * *

  AN ELEGY TO AN OLD BEAUTY.

  In vain, poor nymph, to please our youthful sight
  You sleep in cream and frontlets all the night,
  Your face with patches soil, with paint repair,
  Dress with gay gowns, and shade with foreign hair. 
  If truth in spite of manners must be told,
  Why, really, fifty-five is something old.

   Once you were young; or one, whose life’s so long,
  She might have borne my mother, tells me wrong. 
  And once, (since Envy’s dead before you die)
  The women own, you play’d a sparkling eye, 10
  Taught the light foot a modish little trip,
  And pouted with the prettiest purple lip.

   To some new charmer are the roses fled,
  Which blew, to damask all thy cheek with red;
  Youth calls the graces there to fix their reign,
  And airs by thousands fill their easy train. 
  So parting Summer bids her flowery prime
  Attend the Sun to dress some foreign clime,
  While withering seasons in succession, here,
  Strip the gay gardens, and deform the Year. 20

   But thou (since Nature bids) the world resign,
  ’Tis now thy daughter’s daughter’s time to shine. 
  With more address, (or such as pleases more)
  She runs her female exercises o’er,
  Unfurls or closes, raps or turns the fan,
  And smiles, or blushes at the creature Man. 
  With quicker life, as gilded coaches pass,
  In sideling courtesy she drops the glass. 
  With better strength, on visit-days she bears
  To mount her fifty flights of ample stairs. 30
  Her mien, her shape, her temper, eyes and tongue,
  Are sure to conquer—­for the rogue is young;
  And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay,
  We call it only pretty Fanny’s way.

   Let Time that makes you homely, make you sage,
  The sphere of wisdom is the sphere of age. 
  ’Tis true, when beauty dawns with early fire,
  And hears the flattering tongues of soft desire,
  If not from virtue, from its gravest ways
  The soul with pleasing avocation strays. 40
  But beauty gone, ’tis easier to be wise;
  As harpers better by the loss of eyes.