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Lettered inside image: "23 | Pregnant with all eternity can give; | Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile: | Who murders time, he crushes in the birth | A power ethereal, only not adored. | Ah! how unjust to nature and himself, | Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man! | Like children babbling nonsense in their sports, | *We censure nature for a span too short; | That span too short, we tax as tedious too; | Torture invention, all expedients tire, | To lash the ling'ring moments into speed, | And whirl us, happy riddance! from ourselves. | Art, brainless art! our furious charioteer, | For nature's voice unstifled would recall, | Drives headlong tow'rds the precipice of death-- | Death, most our dread; death thus more dreadful made | O what a riddle of absurdity! | Leisure is pain; take off our chariot-wheels, | How heavily we drag the load of life! | Blest leisure is our curse; like that of Cain, | It makes us wander; wander earth around | To fly that tyrant, thought. As Atlas groan'd | The world beneath, we groan beneath an hour: | We cry for mercy to the next amusement; | The next amusement mortgages our fields-- | Slight inconvenience! prisons hardly frown-- | From hateful time if prisons set us free; | Yet when death kindly tenders us relief, | We call him cruel; years to moments shrink, | Ages to years: the telescope is turn'd,"; lower right: "inv. & sc | WB"; lower right: "Pubd. June 27th. 1796 by R. Edwards No. 142 New Bond Street."; Lettered on facing page: "22 | The straw-like trifles on life's common stream: | From whom those blanks and trifles, but from thee? | No blank, no trifle nature made, or meant. | Virtue, or purposed virtue, still be thine; | This cancels thy complaint at once, this leaves | In act no trifle, and no blank in time; | This greatens, fills, immortalizes all; | This, the blest art of turning all to gold; | This, the good heart's prerogative to raise | A royal tribute from the poorest hours: | Immense revenue! every moment pays. | If nothing more than purpose in thy power; | Thy purpose firm, is equal to the deed: | Who does the best his circumstance allows, | Does well, acts nobly;--angels could no more. | Our outward act, indeed, admits restraint: | 'Tis not in things o'er thought to domineer; | Guard well thy thought; our thoughts are heard in heaven. | On all-important time, through every age, | Though much, and warm, the wise have urged; the man | Is yet unborn, who duly weighs an hour. | 'I've lost a day'--the prince who nobly cried, | Had been an emperor without his crown-- | Of Rome? say rather, lord of human race; | He spoke, as if deputed by mankind: | So should all speak; so reason speaks in all: | From the soft whispers of that God in man, | Why fly to folly, why to frenzy fly, | For rescue from the blessings we possess? | Time, the supreme!--Time is eternity;"