Page:Tale of Paraguay - Southey.djvu/142

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136
A TALE OF PARAGUAY.

LIV.

How little do they see what is, who frame
Their hasty judgement upon that which seems!
Waters that babble on their way proclaim
All shallowness: but in their strength deep stream
Flow silently. Of death Yeruti deems
Not as an ill, but as the last great good,
Compared with which all other he esteems
Transient and void: how then should thought intrude
Of sorrow in his heart for their beatitude?

LV.

While dwelling in their sylvan solitude
Less had Yeruti learnt to entertain
A sense of age than death. He understood
Something of death from creatures he had slain;
But here the ills which follow in the train
Of age, had first to him been manifest,—
The shrunken form, the limbs that move with pain,
The failing sense, infirmity, unrest,—
That in his heart he said to die betimes was best.