Of the Instability of Things.
From the fourth Book of the Astronomicon of MANILIUS.
Nothing remains, in Time's unbounded Space,
Always the same, in Beauty or in Place;
A diff'rent Face of Things with Age appears;
And all Things vary in a Course of Years.
The fruitful Glebe will, weary'd out, decay,
And its prolific Virtues wear away:
While this continual Crops of Grain denys,
On the once barren Heath the Harvests rise;
Nature, by slow Degrees, improves the Soil,
And the Corn springs without the Farmer's Toil.
Now shakes the Earth, before tho firmly bound,
And from the Feet withdraws the treach'rous Ground:
In her own Orbit swims the Globe: the Main
Spues up a Sea, and sucks it in again:
Nor could the Deep within itself contain.
So 'twas of old when, whelm'd beneath the Waves,
Citys immerg'd into their watry Graves:
Deucalion only then remain'd behind,
The solitary Heir of all Mankind;
He on one Rock, one little Spot of Ground,
Then stood possess'd of all the Sun goes round.
When Phaeton, inflam'd with foolish Pride,
Weakly presum'd his Father's Car to guide,
Changes were wrought from what his Rashness fir'd,
And Men and Nations in the Flame expir'd.
Some of these Verses from Manilius were first printed
(but since corrected) in a Book entitled The Natural
History of the Earth, illustrated, enlarged, and defended,
written originally in Latin by Dr. John Woodward,
and published in English by Mr. Benjamin Holloway. I
translated some Passages from the Antients, quoted in that
Treatise, and Part of the Treatise itself, at the Request of
Dr. Woodward, and in the same Year (1725) wrote an
Epistle to Dr. Woodward on his philosophical Writings;
which Epistle was printed in the first Edition of my original
Poems in Octavo; but, as I have now a very different
Opinion of Dr. Woodward and his Writings from what I
then had, I banish that Epistle entirely from me.
