A Good that Never Satisfies the Mind

A Good that never satisfies the mind,

A beauty fading like the April flowers,

A sweet with floods of gall that runs combined,

A pleasure passing ere in thought made ours,

An honour that more fickle is than wind,

A glory at opinion's frown that lowers,

A treasury which bankrupt time devours,

A knowledge than grave ignorance more blind;

A vain delight our equals to command,

A stile of greatness, in effect a dream,

A swelling thought of holding sea and land,

A servile lot, deck't with a pompous name;

Are the strange ends we toil for here below,

Till wisest death make us our errors know.

The book of sonnets,

edited by A Montagu Woodford