Lines written by a lady to console herself for the death of her father:
It will not do to give way To _des_pair and grief, For according to God's ordination Our trials in life are trifling and brief, Compared to eternal damnation.
Here lies Lord Coningsby, be civil, The rest God knows--so does the devil.
Tho' Boreas' blasts and boistrous waves Have tost me to and fro, In spite of both, by God's decree, I harbor here below, Where I do now at Anchor ride With many of our fleet, Yet once again I must set sail My Admiral Christ to meet.
In Corley Churchyard, Warwickshire, England:
These hillocks green and mouldering bones These gloomy tombs and lettered stones, One admonition here supply: Reader! art thou prepared to die?
Sleep soft in dust, wait the Almighty's will, Then rise unchanged, and be an angel still.
Two children in Dorchester (a double inscription):
Abel--his offering accepted is His body to the grave, his soul to blis On Octobers twentye and no more The yeare was sixteen hundred forty-four.
Submite submitted to her heavenly king. Being a flower of that eternal Spring, Near three years old, she died in heaven to wait, The yeare was sixteen hundred forty-eight.
Boreas' blasts and Neptune's waves Have tossed him to and fro, But, by the sacred will of God, He's anchored here below.
Reader, pass on!--don't waste your time On bad biography and bitter rhyme; For what I _am_, this crumbling clay insures, And what I _was_, is no affair of yours!
Beneath this stone our baby lies, It neither cries nor hollers, It lived but one and twenty days, And cost us forty dollars.
This world is a prison in every respect, Whose walls are the heavens in common; The jailor is sin, and the prisoners men; And the fetters are nothing but women.
Forty-nine years they lived as man and wife, And what's more rare, thus many without strife; She first departing, he a few weeks tried To live without her, could not, and so died. Both in their wedlock's great Sabbatic rest To be where there's no wedlock was blest, And having here a jubilee begun They're taken hence that it may ne'er be done.
Here lies a Mother and two Babes, Who God has shortly called to their graves, In heaven we hope they are blest There to remain in eternal rest.