E XIL'D Astrea's come again,
Lo here she doth all things maintain
In number, weight, and measure:
She rules us with delightful pain,
And we obey with pleasure.
By love she rules more than by law,
E 'en her great mercy breedeth awe;
This is her sword and sceptre;
Herewith she hearts did ever draw,
And this guard ever kept her.
Reward doth sit in her right hand, Each virtue thence takes her garland Gather'd in honour's garden:
In her left hand (wherein should be Naught but the sword) sits clemency, A nd conquers vice with pardon.
ENVY, go weep; my Muse and I
Laugh thee to scorn, thy feeble eye
Is dazzled with the glory
Shining in this gay poesy,
A ud little golden story.
Behold how my proud quill doth shed
E ternal nectar on her head:
The pomp of coronation
Hath not such pow'r her fame to spread, As this my admiration.
Respect my pen as free and frank,
Expecting not reward nor thank,
Great wonder only moves it;
I never made it mercenary,
N or should my Muse this burthen carry A s hir'd but that she loves it.
WHERE lives the man that never yet did hear
Of chaste Penelope, Ulysses' queen?
Who kept her faith unspotted twenty year,
Till he return'd that far away had been,
And many men, and many towns had seen:
Ten year at siege of Troy he ling'ring lay,
And ten year in the midland sea did stray.
Homer, to whom the Muses did carouse
A great deep cup with heav'nly nectar fill'd,
The greatest, deepest cup in Jove's great house,
(For Jove himself had so expressly will'd)
He drank off all, nor let one drop be spill'd;
Since when, his brain that had before been dry,
Became the well-spring of all poetry.
Homer doth tell in his abundant verse,
The long laborious travels of the man,
And of his lady too he doth rehearse,
How she illudes with all the art she can,
Th' ungrateful love which other lords began:
For of her lord, false fame had long since sworn,
That Neptune's monsters had his carcass torn.
All this he tells, but one thing he forgot,
One thing most worthy his eternal song,
But he was old, and blind, and saw it not,
Or else he thought he should Ulysses wrong,
To mingle it his tragic acts among:
Yet was there not in all the world of things,
A sweeter burthen for his Muse's wings.
The courtly love Antinous did make,
Antinous that fresh and jolly knight,
Which of the gallants that did undertake
To win the widow, had most wealth and might,
Wit to persuade, and beauty to delight.
The courtly love he made unto the queen,
Homer forgot as if it had not been.
Sing then Terpsichore, my light Muse sing
His gentle art, and cunning courtesy:
You, lady, can remember ev'ry thing,
For you are daughter of queen Memory;
But sing a plain and easy melody:
For the soft mean that warbleth but the ground,
To my rude car doth yield the sweetest sound.
'Sir John Harrington has writ an epigram in commendation of this poem. See the 2d Book, Epig. 67, at the end of his Translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, folio.
It is a great pity, and to be lamented by the poetical world, that so very ingenious a poem should be left unfinished, or, what is more likely, that the imperfect part should be lost; for in all probability he completed it, being written in his youth, in queen Elizabeth's reign, as appears from the conclusion.
One only night's discourse I can report,
When the great torch-bearer of Heav'n was gone
Down in a mask unto the Ocean's court,
To revel it with Thetis all alone;
Antinous disguised and unknown,
Like to the spring in gaudy ornament,
Unto the castle of the princess went.
The sov'reign castle of the rocky iste,
Wherein Penelope the princess lay,
Shone with a thousand lamps, which did exile
The shadows dark, and turn'd the night to day,
Not Jove's blue tent, what time the sunny ray
Behind the bulwark of the Earth retires,
Is seen to sparkle with more twinkling fires.
That night the queen came forth from far within,
And in the presence of her court was seen;
For the sweet singer Phemius did begin
To praise the worthies that at Troy had been ;
Somewhat of her Ulysses she did ween.
In his grave hymn the heav'nly man would sing,
Or of his wars, or of his wandering.
Pallas that hour with her sweet breath divine
Inspir'd immortal beauty in her eyes,
That with celestial glory she did shine,
Brighter than Venus when she doth arise
Out of the waters to adorn the skies;
The wooers all amazed do admire,
And check their own presumptuous desire.
Only Antinous, when at first he view'd
Her star-bright eyes that with new honour shin'd,
Was not dismay'd, but therewithal renew'd
The nobleness and splendour of his mind;
And as he did fit circumstances find,
Unto the throne he boldly did advance,
And with fair manners woo'd the queen to dance.
"Goddess of women, sith your heav'nliness
Hath now vouchsaf'd itself to represent
To our dim eyes, which though they see the less,
Yet are they bless'd in their astonishment,
Imitate Heaven, whose beauties excellent
Are in continual motion day and night,
And move thereby more wonder and delight.
"Let me the mover be, to turn about
Those glorious ornaments, that youth and love
Have fix'd in you, ev'ry part throughout,
Which if you will in timely measure move,
Not all those precious gems in Heav'n above
Shall yield a sight more pleasing to behold,
With all their turns and tracings manifold."
With this the modest princess blush'd and smil'd
Like to a clear and rosy eventide;
And softly did return this answer mild:
"Fair sir, you needs must fairly be deny'd,
Where your demand cannot be satisfy'd:
My feet which only nature taught to go,
Did never yet the art of footing know.
"But why persuade you me to this new rage?
(For all disorder and misrule is new)
For such misgovernment in former age
Our old divine forefathers never knew;
Who if they liv'd, and did the follies view
Which their fond nephews make their chief affairs,
Would hate themselves that had begot such heirs."
"Sole heir of virtue and of beauty both, Whence cometh it," Antinous replies, "That your imperious virtue is so loth To grant your beauty her chief exercise? Or from what spring doth your opinion rise, That dancing is a frenzy and a rage, First known and us'd in this new-fangled age?
"Dancing2 (bright lady) then began to be,
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,
The fire, air, earth, and water did agree,
By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king,.
To leave their first disorder'd combating;
And in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.
"Since when they still are carried in a round,
And changing come one in another's place,
Yet do they neither mingle nor confound,
But ev'ry one doth keep the bounded space
Wherein the dance doth bid it turn or trace:
This wondrous miracle did Love devise,
For dancing is Love's proper exercise.
"Like this, he fram'd the gods' eternal bow'r,
And of a shapeless and confused mass,
By his through piercing and digesting pow'r,
The turning vault of Heaven formed was :
Whose starry wheels he hath so made to pass,
As that their movings do a music frame,
And they themselves still dance unto the same.
"Or if this (all) which round about we see, (As idle Morpheus some sick brains have taught) Of undivided motes compacted be, How was this goodly architecture wrought? Or by what means were they together brought? They err, that say they did concur by chance, Love made them meet in a well order'd dance.
"As when Amphion with his charming lyre Begot so sweet a syren of the air,
That with her rhetoric made the stones conspire The ruin of a city to repair,
(A work of wit and reason's wise affair:)
So Love's smooth tongue, the motes such measure taught
That they join'd hands, and so the world was wrought.
"How justly then is dancing termed new,
Which with the world in point of time begun;
Yea Time itself, (whose birth Jove never knew,
And which indeed is elder than the Sun)
Had not one moment of his age outrun,
When out leap'd Dancing from the heap of things, He cuts the troops, that all asunder fling,
And lightly rode upon his nimble wings.
"Reason hath both her pictures in her treasure,
Where time the measure of all moving is;
And dancing is a moving all in measure;
Now if you do resemble that to this,
And think both one, I think you think amiss:
But if you judge them twins, together got,
And Time first born, your judgment erreth not.
? The antiquity of dancing.
And ere they wist, he casts them in a ring.
"How doth Confusion's mother, headlong Chance",
Put Reason's noble squadron to the rout?
Or how should you that have the governance
Of Nature's children, Heav'n and Earth through-
out,
Prescribe them rules, and live yourselves without?
Why should your fellowship a trouble be,
Since man's chief pleasure is society?
"If sense hath not yet taught you, learn of me
A comely moderation and discreet,
That your assemblies may well order'd be:
When my uniting pow'r shall make you meet,
With heav'nly tunes it shall be temper'd sweet;
And be the model of the world's great frame,
And you Earth's children, Dancing shall it name.
"Behold the world how it is whirled round,
And for it is so whirl'd, is named so;
In whose large volume many rules are found
Of this new art, which it doth fairly show:
For your quick eyes in wand'ring to and fro
From east to west, on no one thing can glance,
But if you mark it well, it seems to dance.
"First you see fix'd in this huge mirror blue Of trembling lights', a number numberless; Fix'd they are nam'd, but with a name untrue, For they all move, and in a dance express That great long year that doth contain no less Than threescore hundreds of those years in all, Which the Sun makes with his course natural.
"What if to you these sparks disorder'd seem,
As if by chance they had been scatter'd there?
The gods a solemn measure do it deem,
And see a just proportion ev'ry where,
And know the points whence first their movings were;
To which first points when all return again,
The axle-tree of Heav'n shall break in twain.
"Under that spangled sky, five wand'ring flames",
Besides the king of day, and queen of night,
Are wheel'd around, all in their sundry frames,
And all in sundry measures do delight,
Yet altogether keep no measure right:
For by itself, each doth itself advance,
And by itself, each doth a galliard dance.
"Venus, the mother of that bastard Love,
Which doth usurp the world's great marshal's name,
Just with the Sun her dainty feet doth move,
And unto him doth all the gestures frame:
Now after, now afore, the flatt'ring dame,
With divers cunning passages doth err,
Still him respecting that respects not her.
"For that brave Sun the father of the day,
Doth love this Earth, the mother of the night,
And like a reveller in rich array
Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight
Both back, and forth, and sideways passing light,
His princely grace doth so the gods amaze,
That all stand still and at his beauty gaze.
* The speech of Love, persuading men to learn dancing.
By the orderly motion of the fixed stars. ⚫ Of the planets.
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