Poetry

not starve, nor hope to pamper her
With women’s milk, and pap, unto the end.

Provide you manlier diet. You have seen
All libraries, which are schools, camps, and courts;
But ask your garners if you have not been
In harvest too indulgent to your sports.

Would you redeem it? then yourself transplant
Awhile from hence. Perchance outlandish ground
Bears no more wit than ours; but yet more scant
Are those diversions there, which here abound.

To be a stranger hath that benefit,
We can beginnings, but not habits choke.
Go⁠—whither? hence. You get, if you forget;
New faults, till they prescribe to us, are smoke.

Our soul, whose country’s heaven, and God her Father,
Into this world, corruption’s sink, is sent;
Yet so much in her travel she doth gather,
That she returns home wiser than she went.

It pays you well, if it teach you to spare,
And make you ashamed to make your hawks’ praise yours,
Which when herself she lessens in the air,
You then first say, that high enough she towers.

However, keep the lively taste you hold
Of God; love Him as now, but fear Him more;
And in your afternoons think what you told
And promised Him, at morning prayer before.

Let falsehood like a discord anger you,
Else be not froward. But why do I touch
Things of which none is in your practice new?
And fables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much.

But thus I make you keep your promise, sir,
Riding I had you, though you still stay’d there;
And in these thoughts, although you never stir,
You came with me to Mitcham, and are here.

To Mr. Rowland Woodward

Like one who in her third widowhood doth profess
Herself a nun, tied to retiredness,
So affects my Muse, now, a chaste fallowness.

Since she to few, yet to too many hath shown,
How love-song weeds and satiric thorns are grown,
Where seeds of better arts were early sown;

Though to use and love poetry, to me,
Betroth’d to no one art, be no adultery;
Omissions of good, ill, as ill deeds be.

For though to us it seem but light and thin,
Yet in those faithful scales, where God throws in
Men’s works, vanity weighs as much as sin.

If our souls have stain’d their first white, yet we
May clothe them with faith, and dear honesty,
Which God imputes as native purity.

There is no virtue but religion.
Wise, valiant, sober, just, are names which none
Want, which want not vice-covering discretion.

Seek we then ourselves in ourselves; for as
Men force the sun with much more force to pass,
By gathering his beams with a crystal glass,

So we⁠—if we into ourselves will turn,
Blowing our spark of virtue⁠—may out-burn
The straw which doth about our hearts sojourn.

You know physicians, when they would infuse
Into any oil the souls of simples, use
Places, where they may lie still warm, to choose.

So works retiredness in us. To roam
Giddily and be everywhere, but at home,
Such freedom doth a banishment become.

We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may,
If we can stock ourselves, and thrive, uplay
Much, much dear treasure for the great rent day.

Manure thyself then, to thyself be improved;
And with vain outward things be no more moved,
But to know that I love thee and would be loved.

To Sir Henry Wotton

Here’s no more news than virtue; I may as well
Tell you Calais, or Saint Michael’s tales, as tell
That vice doth here habitually dwell.

Yet as, to get stomachs, we walk up and down,
And toil to sweeten rest; so, may God frown,
If, but to loathe both, I haunt court or town.

For, here, no one is from th’ extremity
Of vice by any other reason free,
But that the next to him still’s worse than he.

In this world’s warfare, they whom rugged Fate
(God’s commissary) doth so throughly hate,
As in the court’s squadron to marshal their state;

If they stand arm’d with silly honesty,
With wishes, prayers, and neat integrity,
Like Indians ’gainst Spanish hosts they be.

Suspicious boldness to this place belongs,
And to have as many ears as all have tongues;
Tender to know, tough to acknowledge wrongs.

Believe me, sir, in my youth’s giddiest days,
When to be like the court was a play’s praise,
Plays were not so like courts, as courts like plays.

Then let us at these mimic antics jest,
Whose deepest projects and egregious gests
Are but dull morals of a game at chests.

But now ’tis incongruity to smile,
Therefore I end; and bid farewell awhile;
“At court,”⁠—though “from court” were the better style.

Henrico Wottoni in Hibernia Belligeranti

Went you to conquer? and have so much lost
Yourself, that what in you was best and most,
Respective friendship, should so quickly die?
In public gain my share is not such that I
Would lose your love for Ireland: better cheap
I pardon death (who though he do not reap
Yet gleans he many of our friends away)
Then that your waking mind should be a prey
To lethargies. Let shot, and bogs, and skeins
With bodies deal, as fate bids and restrains;
Ere sicknesses attack, young death is best,
Who pays before his death doth ’scape arrest.
Let not your soul (at first with graces fill’d,
And since, and thorough crooked limbecs, still’d
In many schools and courts, which quicken it,)
It self unto the Irish negligence submit.
I ask not laboured letters which should wear
Long papers out: nor letters which should fear
Dishonest carriage: or a seers art:
Nor such as from the brain come, but the heart.

To the Countess of Bedford

Madam⁠—
Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right;
By these we reach divinity, that’s you;
Their loves, who have the blessing of your light,
Grew from their reason; mine from fair faith grew.

But as, although a squint left-handedness
Be ungracious, yet we cannot want that hand;
So would I⁠—not to increase, but to express
My faith⁠—as I believe, so understand.

Therefore I study you first in your saints,
Those friends whom your election glorifies;
Then in your deeds, accesses and restraints,
And what you read, and what yourself devise.

But soon the reasons why you’re loved by all,
Grow infinite, and so pass reason’s reach;
Then