Katherine Philips

Song

'Tis true our life is but a long disease,
Made up of reàl pain and seeming ease.
You stars, who these entangled fortunes give,
    O tell me why
    It is so hard to die,
        Yet such a task to live!

If with some pleasure we our griefs betray,
It costs us dearer than it can repay,
For time or fortune all things so devours,
    Our hopes are crossed,
    Or els the object lost,
        Ere we can call it ours.


[AJ Note:  To the tune of Adieu, Phillis]


Source:
Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Lyrics.
Matthew W. Black, Ed.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1938. 312.



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