The Plague of Athens, which hapned in the second year of the Peloponnesian Warre · Thomas Sprat
XIII.
The belly felt at last its share, And all the subtil labyrinths there Of winding bowels did new Monsters bear. Here seven dayes it rul’d and sway’d, And oftner kill’d because it death so long delay’d. But if through strength and heat of age, The body overcame its rage, The Plague departed, as the Devil doeth, When driven by prayers away he goeth. If Prayers and Heaven do him controul, And if he cannot have the soul, Himself out of the roof or window throws, And will not all his labour lose, But takes away with him part of the house: So here the vanquisht evil took from them Who conquer’d it, some part, some limb; Some lost the use of hands, or eyes, Some armes, some legs, some thighs, Some all their lives before forgot, Their mindes were but one darker blot; Those various pictures in the head, And all the numerous shapes were fled; And now the ransackt memory Languish’d in naked poverty, Had lost its mighty treasury; They past the _Lethe_ Lake, although they did not die. Whatever lesser Maladies men had, They all gave place and vanished; Those petty tyrants fled, And at this mighty Conqueror shrunk their head. Feavers, Agues, Palsies, Stone, Gout, Cholick, and Consumption, And all the milder Generation, By which Man-kind is by degrees undone, Quickly were rooted out and gone; Men saw themselves freed from the pain, Rejoyc’d, but all alas, in vain, ’Twas an unhappy remedie, Which cur’d him that they might both worse and sooner die.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.