University of Virginia Library

Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived
Is past; not come, or gone, he's never here.
Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding man
Receives, not suffers, Death's tremendous blow.
The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave;
The deep, damp vault, the darkness, and the worm:—
These are the bugbears of a winter's eve,
The terrors of the living, not the dead.
Imagination's fool, and Error's wretch,
Man makes a Death which Nature never made;
Then on the point of his own fancy falls,
And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.