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Home  »  The English Poets  »  Extract from The Art of Preserving Health, Book III

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. III. The Eighteenth Century: Addison to Blake

John Armstrong (1709–1779)

Extract from The Art of Preserving Health, Book III

THE BODY, moulded by the clime, endures

The equator heats or hyperborean frost:

Except by habits foreign to its turn,

Unwise, you counteract its forming power.

Rude at the first, the winter shocks you less

By long acquaintance: study then your sky,

Form to its manners your obsequious frame,

And learn to suffer what you cannot shun.

Against the rigors of a damp cold heav’n

To fortify their bodies some frequent

The gelid cistern; and, where nought forbids

I praise their dauntless heart: a frame so steeled

Dreads not the cough, nor those ungenial blasts

That breathe the tertian or fell rheumatism.

The nerves so tempered never quit their tone,

No chronic languors haunt such hardy breasts.

But all things have their bounds: and he who makes

By daily use the kindest regimen

Essential to his health, should never mix

With human kind, nor art, nor trade pursue.

He not the safe vicissitudes of life

Without some shock endures; ill-fitted he

To want the known, or bear unusual things.

Besides, the powerful remedies of pain

(Since pain in spite of all our care will come)

Should never with your prosperous days of health

Grow too familiar: for by frequent use

The strongest medicines lose their healing power

And even the surest poisons theirs to kill.