Poetry

the pieceless centres flow,
And are in all the lines which all ways go.

If either ever wrought in you alone
Or principally, then religion
Wrought your ends, and your ways discretion.

Go thither still; go the same way you went;
Whoso would change, do covet or repent;
Neither can reach you, great and innocent.

To the Countess of Bedford

Begun in France, but never perfected.

Though I be dead and buried, yet I have
—Living in you⁠—court enough in my grave.
As oft as there I think myself to be,
So many resurrections waken me.
That thankfulness, your favours have begot
In me, embalms me, that I do not rot.
This season, as ’tis Easter, as ’tis spring,
Must both to growth and to confession bring
My thoughts, disposed unto your influence; so
These verses bud, so these confessions grow.
First I confess I have to others lent
Your stock, and over⁠—prodigally spent
Your treasure, for since I had never known
Virtue or beauty, but as they are grown
In you, I should not think or say they shine,
—So as I have⁠—in any other mine.
Next I confess this my confession,
For ’tis some fault this much to touch upon
Your praise to you, where half rights seem too much,
And make your mind’s sincere complexion blush.
Next I confess my impenitence, for I
Can scarce repent my first fault, since thereby
Remote low spirits, which shall ne’er read you,
May in less lessons find enough to do,
By studying copies, not originals.

Desunt Caetera.

A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mistress Essex Rich, from Amiens

Madame⁠—
Here, where by all all saints invokèd are,
’Twere too much schism to be singular,
And ’gainst a practice general to war.

Yet turning to saints, should my humility
To other saints than you directed be,
That were to make my schism, heresy.

Nor would I be a convertite so cold,
As not to tell it; if this be too bold,
Pardons are in this market cheaply sold,

Where, because faith is in too low degree,
I thought it some apostleship in me
To speak things which by faith alone I see:

That is, of you, who are a firmament
Of virtues, where no one is grown, or spent;
They’re your materials, not your ornament.

Others, whom we call virtuous, are not so
In their whole substance, but their virtues grow
But in their humours, and at seasons show.

For when through tasteless flat humidity
In dough-baked men some harmlessness we see,
’Tis but his phlegm that’s virtuous, and not he.

So is the blood sometimes; whoever ran
To danger unimportuned, he was then
No better than a sanguine virtuous man.

So cloistral men, who, in pretence of fear,
All contributions to this life forbear,
Have virtue in melancholy, and only there.

Spiritual choleric critics, which in all
Religions find faults, and forgive no fall,
Have through their zeal virtue but in their gall.

We’re thus but parcel-gilt; to gold we’re grown
When virtue is our soul’s complexion;
Who knows his virtue’s name or place, hath none.

Virtue’s but aguish, when ’tis several,
By occasion waked, and circumstantial;
True virtue’s soul, always in all deeds all.

This virtue, thinking to give dignity
To your soul, found there no infirmity,
For your soul was as good virtue as she.

She therefore wrought upon that part of you
Which is scarce less than soul, as she could do;
And so hath made your beauty, virtue too.

Hence comes it that your beauty wounds not hearts,
As others, with profane and sensual darts;
But as an influence, virtuous thoughts imparts.

But if such friends by th’ honour of your sight
Grow capable of this so great a light,
As to partake your virtues and their might;

What must I think that influence must do,
Where it finds sympathy and matter too,
Virtue, and beauty of the same stuff, as you?

Which is, your noble worthy sister; she
Of whom, if what in this my ecstasy
And revelation of you both I see,

I should write here, as in short galleries
The master at the end large glasses ties,
So to present the room twice to our eyes,

So I should give this letter length, and say
That which I said of you; there is no way
From either, but by th’ other, not to stray.

May therefore this be enough to testify
My true devotion, free from flattery;
He that believes himself, doth never lie.

To the Countess of Salisbury, August 1614

Fair, great, and good, since seeing you we see
What heaven can do, what any earth can be;
Since now your beauty shines; now, when the sun,
Grown stale, is to so low a value run,
That his dishevell’d beams, and scatter’d fires
Serve but for ladies’ periwigs and tires
In lovers’ sonnets, you come to repair
God’s book of creatures, teaching what is fair;
Since now, when all is wither’d, shrunk, and dried,
All virtues ebb’d out to a dead, low tide,
All the world’s frame being crumbled into sand,
Where every man thinks by himself to stand,
Integrity, friendship, and confidence,
Cements of greatness, being vapour’d hence,
And narrow man being fill’d with little shares,
Court, city, church are all shops of smallwares;
All having blown to sparks their noble fire,
And drawn their sound gold ingot into wire;
All trying by a love of littleness
To make abridgments, and to draw to less
Even that nothing which at first we were;
Since in these times your greatness doth appear,
And that we learn by it, that man, to get
Towards Him that’s infinite, must first be great:
Since in an age so ill, as none is fit
So much as to accuse, much less mend it
—For who can judge, or witness of those times,
Where all alike are guilty of the crimes?
Where he that would be good, is thought by all
A monster, or at best fantastical⁠—
Since now you durst be good, and that I do
Discern by daring to contemplate you,
That there may be degrees of fair, great, good,
Through your light, largeness, virtue, understood;
If in this sacrifice of mine be shown
Any small spark of these, call it your own
And if things like these have been said by me
Of others, call not that idolatry;
For had God made man first, and man had seen
The third day’s fruits and flowers, and various green,
He might have said the best that he could say
Of those fair creatures which were made that day;
And when next day he