The Art of Preserving Health - A Poem in Four Books. John Armstrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

       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;

      140The vigour sinks, the habit melts away;

       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 fated wrath,

      145Resigns them to the furies of her train;

       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;

      150Where many lazy muddy rivers flow:

       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

      155For ever weeps; or, turgid with the weight

       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;

      160Or any other injury that grows

       From raw-spun fibres idle and unstrung,

       Skin ill-perspiring, and the purple flood

       In languid eddies loitering into phlegm.

      ​

      Yet not alone from humid skies we pine;

      165For air may be too dry. The subtle heaven,

       That winnows into dust the blasted downs,

       Bare and extended wide without a stream,

       Too fast imbibes th' attenuated lymph

       Which, by the surface, from the blood exhales.

      170The lungs grow rigid, and with toil essay

       Their flexible vibrations; or inflam'd,

       Their tender ever-moving structure thaws.

       Spoil'd of its limpid vehicle, the blood

       A mass of lees remains, a drossy tide

      175That flow as Lethe wanders thro' the veins,

       Unactive in the services of life,

       Unfit to lead its pitchy current thro'

       The secret mazy channels of the brain.

       The melancholic fiend, (that worst despair

      180Of physic) hence the rust-complexion'd man

       Pursues, whose blood is dry, whose fibres gain

      ​

      Too stretch'd a tone: And hence in climes adust

       So sudden tumults seize the trembling nerves,

       And burning fevers glow with double rage.