‘Will you embrace contempt and beggary? Can you endure to see each other cursed By want, of every human wo the worst? Warring for ever with distress, in dread 240 Either of begging or of wanting bread; While poverty, with unrelenting force, Will your own offspring from your love divorce; They, through your folly, must be doom’d to pine, And you deplore your passion, or resign; For, if it die, what good will then remain? And if it live, it doubles every pain.’”-- “But you were true,” exclaim’d the lass, “and fled } The tyrant’s power who fill’d your soul with dread?”-- } “But,” said the smiling friend, “he fill’d my mouth } with bread; } 250 And in what other place that bread to gain We long consider’d, and we sought in vain. This was my twentieth year--at thirty-five Our hope was fainter, yet our love alive; So many years in anxious doubt had pass’d.”-- “Then,” said the damsel, “you were bless’d at last?” A smile again adorn’d the widow’s face, But soon a starting tear usurp’d its place.-- “Slow pass’d the heavy years, and each had more Pains and vexations than the years before. 260 My father fail’d; his family was rent, And to new states his grieving daughters sent; Each to more thriving kindred found a way, Guests without welcome--servants without pay; Our parting hour was grievous; still I feel The sad, sweet converse at our final meal: Our father then reveal’d his former fears, Cause of his sternness, and then join’d our tears; Kindly he strove our feelings to repress, But died, and left us heirs to his distress. 270 The rich, as humble friends, my sisters chose; I with a wealthy widow sought repose; Who with a chilling frown her friend received, Bade me rejoice, and wonder’d that I grieved: In vain my anxious lover tried his skill To rise in life, he was dependent still; We met in grief, nor can I paint the fears Of these unhappy, troubled, trying years: Our dying hopes and stronger fears between, We felt no season peaceful or serene; 280 Our fleeting joys, like meteors in the night, Shone on our gloom with inauspicious light; And then domestic sorrows, till the mind, Worn with distresses, to despair inclined; Add too the ill that from the passion flows, When its contemptuous frown the world bestows-- The peevish spirit caused by long delay, When being gloomy we contemn the gay, When, being wretched, we incline to hate And censure others in a happier state; 290 Yet loving still, and still compell’d to move In the sad labyrinth of ling’ring love: While you, exempt from want, despair, alarm, May wed--oh! take the farmer and the farm.”