loins, And rack the joints, and every torpid limb;
Then parching heat succeeds, till copious sweats
O'erflow; a short relief from former ills.
Beneath repeated shocks the wretches pine;
140The vigour sinks, the habit melts away;
The chearful, pure and animated bloom
Dies from the face, with squalid atrophy
Devour'd, in sallow melancholy clad.
And oft the sorceress, in her fated wrath,
145Resigns them to the furies of her train;
The bloated Hydrops, and the yellow fiend
Ting'd with her own accumulated gall.
In quest of sites, avoid the mournful plain
Where osiers thrive, and trees that love the lake;
150Where many lazy muddy rivers flow:
Nor for the wealth that all the Indies roll
Fix near the marshy margin of the main.
For from the humid soil, and watry reign,
Eternal vapours rise; the spungy air
155For ever weeps; or, turgid with the weight
Of waters, pours a sounding deluge down.
Skies such as these let every mortal shun
Who dreads the dropsy, palsy, or the gout,
Tertian, corrosive scurvy, or moist catarrh;
160Or any other injury that grows
From raw-spun fibres idle and unstrung,
Skin ill-perspiring, and the purple flood
In languid eddies loitering into phlegm.
Yet not alone from humid skies we pine;
165For air may be too dry. The subtle heaven,
That winnows into dust the blasted downs,
Bare and extended wide without a stream,
Too fast imbibes th' attenuated lymph
Which, by the surface, from the blood exhales.
170The lungs grow rigid, and with toil essay
Their flexible vibrations; or inflam'd,
Their tender ever-moving structure thaws.
Spoil'd of its limpid vehicle, the blood
A mass of lees remains, a drossy tide
175That flow as Lethe wanders thro' the veins,
Unactive in the services of life,
Unfit to lead its pitchy current thro'
The secret mazy channels of the brain.
The melancholic fiend, (that worst despair
180Of physic) hence the rust-complexion'd man
Pursues, whose blood is dry, whose fibres gain
Too stretch'd a tone: And hence in climes adust
So sudden tumults seize the trembling nerves,
And burning fevers glow with double rage.
185Fly, if you can, these violent extremes
Of air; the wholesome is nor moist nor dry.
But as the power of chusing is deny'd
To half mankind, a further task ensues;
How best to mitigate these fell extreams,
190How breathe unhurt the withering element,
Or hazy atmosphere: Tho' custom moulds
To every clime the soft Promethean clay;
And he who first the fogs of Essex breath'd
(So kind is native air) may in the fens
195Of Essex from inveterate ills revive
At pure Montpelier or Bermuda caught.
But if the raw and oozy heaven offend,
Correct the soil, and dry the sources up
Of watry exhalation; wide and deep
200Conduct your trenches thro' the spouting bog;
Solicitous, with all your winding arts,
Betray th' unwilling lake into the stream;
And weed the forest, and invoke the winds
To break the toils where strangled vapours lie;
205Or thro' the thickets send the crackling flames.
Mean time, at home with chearful fires dispel
The humid air: And let your table smoke
With solid roast or bak'd; or what the herds
Of tamer breed supply; or what the wilds
210Yield to the toilsom pleasures of the chase.
Generous your wine, the boast of rip'ning years,
But frugal be your cups; the languid frame,
Vapid and sunk from yesterday's debauch,
Shrinks from the cold embrace of watry heavens.
215But neither these, nor all Apollo's arts,
Disarm the dangers of the dropping sky,
Unless with exercise and manly toil
You brace your nerves, and spur the lagging blood.
The fat'ning clime let all the sons of ease
220Avoid; if indolence would wish to live.
Go, yawn and loiter out the long slow year
