When pensive on that portraiture I gaze, Where my four brothers round about me stand, And four fair sisters smile with graces bland, The goodly monument of happier days; And think how soon insatiate Death, who preys On all, has cropped the rest with ruthless hand; While only I survive of all that band, Which one chaste bed did to my father raise; It seems that like a column left alone, The tottering remnant of some splendid fane, 'Scaped from the fury of the barbarous Gaul, And wasting Time, which has the rest o'erthrown; Amidst our house's ruins I remain Single, unpropped, and nodding to my fall. |