What does not fade? The tower that long had stood The crush of thunder, and the warring winds, 545 Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time, Now hangs in doubtful ruins o’er its base. And flinty pyramids, and walls of brass, Descend; the Babylonian spires are sunk; Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down. 550 Time shakes the liable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight. This huge rotundity we tread grows old; And all those worlds that roll around the sun, The sun himself, shall die; and ancient Night 555 Again involve the desolate abyss: Till the great FATHER thro’ the lifeless gloom Extend his arm to light another world, And bid new planets roll by other laws. For thro’ the regions of unbounded space, 560 Where unconfin’d omnipotence has room, BEING, in various systems, fluctuates still Between creation and abhorr’d decay; It ever did; perhaps and ever will. New worlds are still emerging from the deep; 565 The old descending, in their turns to rise. BOOK III. EXERCISE. Thro’ various toils th’ adventurous muse has past; But half the toil, and more than half, remains. Rude is her theme, and hardly fit for song; Plain, and of little ornament; and I But little practis’d in th’ Aonian arts. 5 Yet not in vain such labours have we tried, If ought these lays the fickle health confirm. To you, ye delicate, I write; for you I tame my youth to philosophic cares, And grow still paler by the midnight lamps. 10 Not to debilitate with timorous rules A hardy frame; nor needlessly to brave Unglorious dangers, proud of mortal strength; Is all the lesson that in wholsome years Concerns the strong. His care were ill bestow’d 15 Who would with warm effeminacy nurse The thriving oak, which on the mountain’s brow Bears all the blasts that sweep the wintry heav’n. Behold the labourer of the glebe, who toils In dust, in rain, in cold and sultry skies: 20 Save but the grain from mildews and the flood, Nought anxious he what sickly stars ascend. He knows no laws by Esculapius given; He studies none. Yet him nor midnight fogs Infest, nor those envenom’d shafts that fly 25 When rabid Sirius fires th’ autumnal noon. His habit pure with plain and temperate meals, Robust with labour, and by custom steel’d To every casualty of varied life; Serene he bears the peevish eastern blast, 30 And uninfected breaths the mortal South.