ye nights, ordained for barren rest,
How are my days deprived of life in you,
When heavy sleep my soul hath dispossest,
By feigned death life sweetly to renew!
Part of my life in that, you life deny:
So every day we live a day we die.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Tired with all these, for restful death I
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Poor soul, the centre of
Foiled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
Comfort to a Youth that had Lost his Love
What needs complaints,
When she a place
Has with the race
Of saints?
In endless mirth,
She thinks not on
What's said or done
In earth.
Of thy deep groan
She hears:
Nor does she mind
Or think on 't now
That ever thou
Wast kind;
But changed above,
She likes not there
As she did here.
Thy love.
Forbear, therefore,
And lull asleep
Thy woes, and weep
No more.
A part of this selection has been published, in another form and differently arranged, as one of the volumes of Blackie's "Red Letter Poets", where, in order to fit into the limits of a "Sixteenth Century Anthology", and not to overlap the "Seventeenth Century Anthology", already published in the same series, all writers born later than 1570 had to be excluded. Thus I had to do without almost all the Elizabethan dramatists, those great lyrical poets, and without Herrick, Donne, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Browne of Tavistock. The book as now arranged, with the addition of some hundred and twenty or so more poems (four only having been omitted) comes nearer to my original idea of a selection of the best poems of that period which is conveniently known as Elizabethan; a period properly ending with Herrick, after whom come the Cavaliers and the mystics, and a new world. To begin with Spenser and to end with Herrick is to include, I think, everything characteristic of that period, and nothing outside it.
In making my choice among the almost endless anonymous lyrics of the period I have thankfully followed the best of guides, not only a guide but a
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