[Page 47]

[MORAL SONG] III. The ROSE.

I.
1 HOW fair is the Rose? what a beautiful Flow'r?
2 The Glory of April and May:
3 But the Leaves are beginning to fade in an Hour,
4 And they wither and die in a Day.
II.
5 Yet the Rose has one powerful Virtue to boast,
6 Above all the Flowers of the Field:
7 When its Leaves are all dead, and fine Colours are lost,
8 Still how sweet a Perfume it will yield?
III.
9 So frail is the Youth and the Beauty of Men,
10 Tho' they bloom and look gay like the Rose:
11 But all our fond Care to preserve them is vain;
12 Time kills them as fast as he goes.
[Page 48]
IV.
13 Then I'll not be proud of my Youth or my Beauty,
14 Since both of them wither and fade:
15 But gain a good Name by well-doing my Duty;
16 This will scent like a Rose when I'm dead.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 43K / ZIP - 5.0K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 752 / ZIP - 618 )

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized from a copy in the Bodleian Library [Vet. A5 f.3516].)

Images

PDF

All Images (PDF - 2.1M)

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): [MORAL SONG] III. The ROSE.
Author: Isaac Watts
Themes:
Genres: song

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Watts, Isaac, 1674-1748. Divine songs: attempted in easy language for the use of children. By I. Watts, D.D. London: Printed for J. Buckland; J. F. and C. Rivington; T. Longman; W. Fenner; T. Field; and E. and C. Dilly, 1777, pp. 47-48. xii,58,[2]p.; 12⁰. (ESTC T185045; OTA K123515.000) (Page images digitized from a copy in the Bodleian Library [Vet. A5 f.3516].)

Editorial principles

The text has been typographically modernized, but without any silent modernization of spelling, capitalization, or punctuation. The source of the text is given and all editorial interventions have been recorded in textual notes. Based on the electronic text originally produced by the TCP project, this ECPA text has been edited to conform to the recommendations found in Level 5 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries version 4.0.0.

Other works by Isaac Watts