Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

Love me not for comely grace,
For my pleasing eye or face;
Not for any outward part,
No, nor for my constant heart;
For those may fail, or turn to ill,
And thus we love shall sever:

Keep, therefore, a true woman's eye,
And love me still,

Yet know not why,

So hast thou the same reason still,
To dote upon me ever.

I SANG Sometimes my thoughts and fancy's pleasure, Where then I list, or time served best,

While Daphne did invite me

To supper once, and drank to me to spite me : I smiled, yet still did doubt her,

And drank where she had drank before, to flout her. But O, while I did eye her,

My eyes drank love, my lips drank burning fire.

O LIGHT is love, in matchless beauty shining,
When she revisits Cyprus' hallowed bowers,
Two feeble doves, harness'd in silken twining,
Can draw her chariot 'mid the Paphian flowers:
Lightness in love how ill she fitteth,
So heavy on my heart she sitteth.

FROM BIRD'S COLLECTION OF SONGS, &c.

YOUR shining eyes and golden hair,
Your lily rosed lips most fair,
Your other beauties that excel,
Men cannot chuse but like them well;
But when for them they say they'll die,
Believe them not, they do but lie.

AMBITIOUS love hath forced me to aspire
To beauties rare, which do adorn thy face;
Thy modest life yet bridles my desire,
Whose law severe doth promise me no grace.

But what! may love live under any law?
No, no, his power exceedeth man's conceit,
Of which the gods themselves do stand in awe,
For on his frown a thousand torments wait.
Proceed, then, in this deperate enterprise
With good advice, and follow love, thy guide,
That leads thee to thy wished paradise:
Thy climbing thoughts this comfort take withal,
That if it be thy foul disgrace to slide,
Thy brave attempt shall yet excuse thy fall.

AMID the seas a gallant ship set out,
Wherein nor men nor yet 'munition lacks,
In greatest winds that spareth not a clout,
But cuts the waves in spite of weather's wrack,
Would force a swain that comes of coward kind,
To change himself, and be of noble mind.

Who makes his seat a stately stamping steed, Whose neighs and plays are princely to behold; Whose courage stout, whose eyes are fiery red, Whose joints well knit, whose harness all of gold, Doth well deserve to be no meaner thing

Than Persian knight, whose horse made him a king.

By that bedside where sits a gallant dame,
Who casteth off her brave and rich attire,
Whose petticoat sets forth as fair a frame
As mortal men or gods can well desire;
Who sits and sees her petticoat unlaced,
I say no more—the rest are all disgraced.

SONGS FROM WEELKES'S MADRIGALS.
EDIT. 1604.

LIKE two proud armies marching in the field,
Joining a thund'ring fight, each scorns to yield,
So in my heart your beauty and my reason,
To th' other says, it's treason, treason, treason:
But your fair beauty shineth as the sun,
And dazzled reason yields as quite undone.

GIVE me my heart and I will go,
Or else forsake your wonted no,

No, no, no-No, no, no.

But since my dear doth doubt me, With no, no, no, I mean to flout thee;

No, no, no.

Now there is hope we shall agree,

Since double no imparteth yea;

If that be so, my dearest,

With no, no, no, my heart thou cheerest.

COLD winter ice is fled and gone,

And summer brags on every tree;
The red-breast peeps among the throng
Of wood-brown birds that wanton be:
Each one forgets what they have been,
And so doth Phyllis, summer's queen.

HOLD out my heart, with joy's delights accloy'd ;
Hold out my heart and show it,
That all the world may know it,
What sweet content thou lately hast enjoy'd.
She that "Come, dear!" would say,
Then laugh, and smile, and run away;
And if I stay'd her would cry nay,
Fy for shame, fy.

My true love not regarding,

Hath giv'n me at length his full rewarding,
So that unless I tell

The joys that overfill me,
My joys, kept in full well,
I know will kill me.

SAY, dear, will you not have me?
Then take the kiss you gave me ;
You elsewhere would, perhaps, bestow it,
And I would be as loth to owe it;

Or if you will not take the thing once given,
Let me kiss you, and then we shall be even.

FROM BATESON'S MADRIGALS.
EDIT. 1606.

LOVE would discharge the duty of his heart
In beauty's praise, whose greatness doth deny
Words to his thoughts, and thoughts to his desert;
Which high conceit, since nothing can supply,
Love here constrain'd through conquest to confess,
Bids silence sigh what tongue cannot express.

WHITHER SO fast? Ah, see the kindly flowers
Perfume the air, and all to make thee stay;
The climbing woodbind, clipping all these bowers,
Clips thee likewise, for fear thou pass away:
Fortune, our friend, our foe, will not gainsay:
Stay but awhile, Phoebe no tell-tale is,
She her Endymion-I'll my Phoebe kiss.

YET stay, alway be chained to my heart With links of love, that we do never part; Then I'll not call thee serpent, tiger, cruel, But my sweet Gemma, and my dearest jewel.

TO HIS LOVE.

FROM ENGLAND'S HELICON.

COME away, come, sweet love!
The golden morning breaks,
All the earth, all the air,
Of love and pleasure speaks;
Teach thine arms then to embrace,
And sweet rosy lips to kiss,
And mix our souls in mutual bliss:
Eyes were made for beauty's grace;
Viewing, ruing, love's long pain,
Procured by beauty's rude disdain.

Come away, come, sweet love!
The golden morning wastes,
While the sun from his sphere
His fiery arrows casts,
Making all the shadows fly,
Playing, staying, in the grove,
To entertain the stealth of love;
Thither, sweet love, let us hie,
Flying, dying, in desire,

Wing'd with sweet hopes and heavenly fire.

Come, come, sweet love!

Do not in vain adorn

Beauty's grace, that should rise
Like to the naked morn.

Lilies on the river's side,

And fair Cyprian flow'rs newly blown,
Ask no beauties but their own.
Ornament is nurse of pride-

*

ار

JOHN LYLY

[Born, 1554. Died, 1600.]

Was born in the Weald of Kent. Wood places his birth in 1553. Oldys makes it appear probable that he was born much earlier*. He I studied at both the universities, and for many years attended the court of Elizabeth in expectation of being made Master of the Revels. In this object he was disappointed, and was obliged, in his old age, to solicit the Queen for some trifling grant to support himt, which it is uncertain whether he ever obtained. Very little indeed is known of him, though Blount, his editor, tells us that he sate at Apollo's table, and that the god gave him a wreath of his own bays without [* Lyly was born in Kent in 1554, and was matriculated at Oxford in 1571, when it was recorded in the entry that he was seventeen years old.-COLLIER's Annals, vol. iii. p. 174.]

If he was an old man in the reign of Elizabeth, Oldys's conjecture as to the date of his birth seems to be verified, as we scarcely call a man old at fifty.

snatching." Whether Apollo was ever so complaisant or not, it is certain that Lyly's work of "Euphues and his England," preceded by another called " Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," &c. promoted a fantastic style of false wit, bombastic metaphor, and pedantic allusion, which it was fashionable to speak at court under the name of Euphuism, and which the ladies thought it indispensable to acquire. Lyly, in his Euphues, probably did not create the new style, but only collected and methodised the floating affectations of phraseology.-Drayton ascribes the overthrow of Euphuism to Sir P. Sydney, who, he says,

did first reduce

Our tongue from Lylie's writing then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Plying with words and idle similies,

As th' English apes and very zanies be
Of everything that they do hear and see.

Sydney died in 1586, and Euphues had appeared but six years earlier. We may well suppose Sydney to have been hostile to such absurdity, and his writings probably promoted a better taste; but we hear of Euphuism being in vogue

many years after his death; and it seems to have expired, like all other fashions, by growing vulgar. Lyly wrote nine plays, in some of which there is considerable wit and humour, rescued from the jargon of his favourite system.

CUPID AND CAMPASPE.

CUPID and my Campaspe play'd
At cards for kisses: Cupid paid.
He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows;
His mother's doves and team of sparrows;
Loses them too: then down he throws
The coral of his lip-the rose

Growing on 's cheek, but none knows how,
With these the crystal on his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin;
All these did my Campaspe win:
At last he set her both his eyes;
She won, and Cupid blind did rise;
O Love, hath she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?

SONG.

FROM ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE.

WHAT bird so sings, yet so does wail?
O'tis the ravish'd nightingale-
Jug, jug, jug, jug-tereu-she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.

Brave prick-song! who is't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear;
Now at Heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings.

Hark! hark! but what a pretty note,
Poor Robin red-breast tunes his throat;
Hark! how the jolly cuckoos sing
Cuckoo-to welcome in the spring.

FROM MOTHER BOMBIE.

O CUPID, monarch over kings,
Wherefore hast thou feet and wings?
Is it to show how swift thou art,
When thou wound'st a tender heart?
Thy wings being clipt and feet held still,
Thy bow so many could not kill.

It is all one in Venus' wanton school,
Who highest sits, the wise man or the fool-
Fools in Love's college
Have far more knowledge,
To read a woman over,
Than a neat-prating lover;
Nay, 'tis confest

That fools please women best.

ALEXANDER HUME [Born, 1500? Died, 1609?]

WAS the second son of Patrick, fifth Baron of Polwarth, from whom the family of Marchmont are descended. He was born probably about the middle, and died about the end, of the sixteenth century. During four years of the earlier part of his life, he resided in France, after which he returned home and studied law, but abandoned the bar to try his fortune at court. There he is said to have been disgusted with the preference shown to a poetical rival, Montgomery, with whom he exchanged flytings, (or invectives,) in verse, and who boasts of having "driven Polwart from the chimney nook." He then went into the church, and was appointed rector or minister of Logie; the names of ecclesiastical offices in Scotland then floating between presbytery and prelacy. In the clerical profession he continued till his death. Hume lived at a period when the spirit of Calvinism in Scotland was at its gloomiest

pitch, and when a reformation, fostered by the poetry of Lyndsay, and by the learning of Buchanan, had begun to grow hostile to elegant literature. Though the drama, rude as it was, had been no mean engine in the hands of Lyndsay against popery, yet the Scottish reformers of this latter period even anticipated the zeal of the English puritans against dramatic and romantic poetry, which they regarded as emanations from hell. Hume had imbibed so far the spirit of his times as to publish an exhortation to the youth of Scotland to forego the admiration of all classical heroes, and to read no other books on the subject of love than the Song of Solomon. But Calvinism* itself could not entirely eradicate the

*This once gloomy influence of Calvinism on the literary character of the Scottish churchmen, forms a contrast with more recent times, that needs scarcely to be suggested to those acquainted with Scotland. In extend

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]
« PoprzedniaDalej »