The slender debt to Nature’s quickly paid,
Discharged, perchance, with greater ease than made.

In these couplets Quarles frames human life as a “debt” owed to Nature—something borrowed (breath, vitality, bodily substance) and inevitably repaid in death. Calling it “slender” underscores life’s fragility and brevity, while “quickly paid” stresses how swiftly mortality settles the account. The second line adds a bleak irony: the repayment (dying) may come more easily than the debt was incurred (being born, surviving, and sustaining life). The moral pressure typical of Quarles’s devotional verse is implicit: since Nature will reclaim what it lends, one should not treat earthly life as secure capital but as a short stewardship, prompting humility and spiritual readiness.