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Lettered inside image: "7 | How richly were my noontide trances hung | With gorgeous tapestries of pictured joys, | Joy behind joy, in endless perspective! | *Till at Death's toll, whose restless iron tongue | Calls daily for his millions at a meal, | Starting I 'woke, and found myself undone. | Where's now my frenzy's pompous furniture? | The cobweb'd cottage, with its ragged wall | Of mould'ring mud, is royalty to me: | The spider's most attenuated thread, | Is cord, is cable, to man's tender tie | On earthly bliss; it breaks at every breeze. | O ye blest scenes of permanent delight! | Full, above measure! lasting, beyond bound! | A perpetuity of bliss, is bliss. | Could you, so rich in rapture, fear an end, | That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, | And quite unparadise the realms of light. | Safe are you lodged above these rolling spheres; | The baleful influence of whose giddy dance | Sheds sad vicissitude on all beneath. | Here teems with revolutions every hour, | And rarely for the better; or the best, | More mortal than the common births of fate: | Each moment has its sickle, emulous | Of time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep | Strikes empires from the root; each moment plays | His little weapon in the narrower sphere | Of sweet domestick comfort, and cuts down | The fairest bloom of sublunary bliss."; lower left: "inv. & sc | WB"; lower left: "Pubd. June 27, 1796, by R. Edwards, No. 142 New Bond Street."; Lettered on facing page: "6 | To fly at infinite; and reach it there, | Where seraphs gather immortality | On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of GOD. | What golden joys ambrosial clust'ring glow | In HIS full beam, and ripen for the just-- | Where momentary ages are no more! | Where time, and pain, and chance, and death expire! | And is it in the flight of threescore years, | To push eternity from human thought, | And smother souls immortal in the dust? | A soul immortal, spending all her fires, | Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness, | Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm'd | At aught this scene can threaten, or indulge, | Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, | To waft a feather, or to drown a fly. | Where falls this censure? It o'erwhelms myself: | How was my heart incrusted by the world! | O how self-fetter'd was my groveling soul! | How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round | In silken thought, which reptile fancy spun; | Till darken'd reason lay quite clouded o'er | With soft conceit of endless comfort here, | Nor yet put forth her wings to reach the skies! | Night-visions may befriend, as sung above: | Our waking dreams are fatal: how I dreamt | Of things impossible! could sleep do more? | Of joys perpetual in perpetual change! | Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave! | Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!"