“Welcome! yes! let me welcome, if I can,
The fortune dealt me by this cruel man: 
Welcome this low-thatch’d roof, this shatter’d door,
These walls of clay, this miserable floor;
Welcome my envied neighbours; this to you
Is all familiar—­all to me is new: 
You have no hatred to the loathsome meal,
Your firmer nerves no trembling terrors feel,
Nor, what you must expose, desire you to conceal;
What your coarse feelings bear without offence,
Disgusts my taste and poisons every sense: 
Daily shall I your sad relations hear
Of wanton women and of men severe;
There will dire curses, dreadful oaths abound,
And vile expressions shock me and confound: 
Noise of dull wheels, and songs with horrid words,
Will be the music that this lane affords;
Mirth that disgusts, and quarrels that degrade
The human mind, must my retreat invade: 
Hard is my fate! yet easier to sustain,
Than to abide with guilt and fraud again;
A grave impostor! who expects to meet,
In such gray locks and gravity, deceit? 
Where the sea rages and the billows roar,
Men know the danger, and they quit the shore;
But, be there nothing in the way descried,
When o’er the rocks smooth runs the wicked tide —
Sinking unwarn’d, they execrate the shock
And the dread peril of the sunken rock.” 
   A frowning world had now the man to dread,
Taught in no arts, to no profession bred;
Pining in grief, beset with constant care
Wandering he went, to rest he knew not where. 
   Meantime the Wife—­but she abjured the name —
Endured her lot, and struggled with the shame;
When, lo! an uncle on the mother’s side,
In nature something, as in blood allied,
Admired her firmness, his protection gave,
And show’d a kindness she disdain’d to crave. 
   Frugal and rich the man, and frugal grew
The sister-mind without a selfish view;
And further still—­the temp’rate pair agreed
With what they saved the patient poor to feed: 
His whole estate, when to the grave consign’d,
Left the good kinsman to the kindred mind;
Assured that law, with spell secure and tight,
Had fix’d it as her own peculiar right. 
   Now to her ancient residence removed,
She lived as widow, well endowed and loved;
Decent her table was, and to her door
Came daily welcomed the neglected poor: 
The absent sick were soothed by her relief,
As her free bounty sought the haunts of grief;
A plain and homely charity had she,
And loved the objects of her alms to see;
With her own hands she dress’d the savoury meat,
With her own fingers wrote the choice receipt;
She heard all tales that injured wives relate,
And took a double interest in their fate;
But of all husbands not a wretch was known
So vile, so mean, so cruel as her own. 
   This bounteous Lady kept an active spy,
To search th’ abodes of want, and to supply;
The gentle Susan served the liberal dame —