Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/275

Rh clergy’s bugbears, invented as nurses do frightful names for their children, to scare 'em into quietness and obedience. How oft have I triumphed in my unconcerned and seared insensibility? How oft boasted of that unhappy suspected calm, which, like that of the Dead Sea, proved only my curse, and a treacherous ambush to those storms, which at present (and will for ever, I dread,) shipwreck my quiet and hopes? How oft have I rejected the advice of that bosom friend, and drowned its alarms in the noise of a tumultuous debauch, or by stupifying wine (like some condemned malefactor) armed myself against the apprehensions of my certain doom?

Now, now the tyrant awakes, and comes to pay at once all arrears of cruelty. At last, but too late, (like drowning mariners) I see the gay monsters which inveigled me. into my death and destruction. Oh, the gnawing remorse of a rash, unguarded, unconsidering sinner! Oh, how the ghosts of former crimes affright my haunted imagination, and make me suffer a thousand racks and martyrdoms! I see, methinks, the jaws of destruction gaping wide to swallow me; and I (like one sliding on ice), though I see the danger, cannot stop from running into it. My fancy represents to me a whole legion of devils, ready to tear me in pieces, numberless as my sins or fears; and whither, alas! whither shall I fly for refuge? Where shall I retreat and take sanctuary? Shall I call the rocks and mountains to cover me, or bid the earth yawn wide to its centre, and take me in? Poor shift of escaping Almighty justice! Distracting frenzy! that would make me believe contradictions, and hope to fly out of the reach of him whose presence is everywhere, not excluding hell itself; for he is there in the effects of his vengeance. Shall I invoke some power infinite as that that created me, to reduce me to nothing again, and rid me at once of my being and all that tortures it? Oh no, 'tis in vain; I must be forced into being, to keep me fresh for torment, and retain sense only to feel pain. I must be dying to all eternity, and live ever, to live ever wretched. Oh that Nature had placed me in the rank of things that have only a bare existence, or, at best, an animal life, and never given me a soul and reason, which now must contribute to my misery, and make me envy brutes and vegetables! Would the womb that bore me had been my prison till now, or I stept out of it into my grave, and saved the expenses and toil of a long and tedious journey, where life affords nothing of accommodations to invite one's stay! Happy had I been if I had expired with my first breath, and entered the Bill of Mortality as soon as the world; happy if I had been