Broader she laves fair Richmond’s green retreats, (Richmond that sees an hundred villas rise Rural or gay.) O! from the summer’s rage O! wrap me in the friendly gloom that hides 115 Umbrageous Ham! But if the busy town Attract thee still to toil for power or gold, Sweetly thou mayst thy vacant hours possess In Hampstead, courted by the western wind; Or Greenwich, waving o’er the winding flood; 120 Or lose the world amid the sylvan wilds Of Dulwich, yet by barbarous arts unspoil’d. Green rise the Kentish hills in chearful air; But on the marshy plains that Essex spreads Build not, nor rest too long thy wandering feet. 125 For on a rustic throne of dewy turf, With baneful fogs her aching temples bound, Quartana there presides; a meagre fiend Begot by Eurus, when his brutal force Compress’d the slothful Naiad of the fens. 130 From such a mixture sprung this fitful pest, With feverish blasts subdues the sick’ning land: Cold tremors come, and mighty love of rest, Convulsive yawnings, lassitude, and pains That sting the burden’d brows, fatigue the loins, 135 And rack the joints, and every torpid limb; Then parching heat succeeds, till copious sweats O’erflow; a short relief from former ills. Beneath repeated shocks the wretches pine; The vigour sinks, the habit melts away; 140 The chearful, pure and animated bloom Dies from the face, with squalid atrophy Devour’d, in sallow melancholy clad. And oft the sorceress, in her sated wrath, Resigns them to the furies of her train; 145 The bloated Hydrops, and the yellow fiend Ting’d with her own accumulated gall. In quest of sites, avoid the mournful plain Where osiers thrive, and trees that love the lake; Where many lazy muddy rivers flow: 150 Nor for the wealth that all the Indies roll Fix near the marshy margin of the main. For from the humid soil, and watry reign, Eternal vapours rise; the spungy air For ever weeps; or, turgid with the weight 155 Of waters, pours a sounding deluge down. Skies such as these let every mortal shun Who dreads the dropsy, palsy, or the gout, Tertian, corrosive scurvy, or moist catarrh; Or any other injury that grows 160 From raw-spun fibres idle and unstrung, Skin ill-perspiring, and the purple flood In languid eddies loitering into phlegm.