Find, if you can, in what you cannot change. Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, Tenets with books, and principles with times.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.