Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I 'll study thee,
As he removes far off, that great heights takes:
How great love is, presence best trial makes,
But absence tries, how long this love will be
To take a latitude,

Sun, or stars, are titliest view'd

At their brightest; but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?

If, as in water stirr'd more circles be
Produc'd by one, love such additions take,
Those, like so many spheres, but one Heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee;

And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,

No winter shall abate this spring's increase.

COMMUNITY.

Goop we must love, and must hate ill,
For ill is ill, and good good still;

But there are things indifferent,
Which we may neither hate nor love,
But one, and then another prove,

As we shall find out fancy bent.

If then at first wise Nature had
Made women either good or bad,

Then some we might hate, and some chuse,
But since she did them so create,
That we may neither love nor hate,
Only this rests, all all may use.

If they were good, it would be seen,
Good is as visible as green,

And to all eyes itself betrays:
If they were bad, they could not last,
Bad doth itself and others waste,

So they deserve nor blame nor praise.

But they are ours, as fruits are ours,
He that but tastes, he that devours,

And he that leaves all, doth as well; Chang'd loves are but chang'd sorts of meat; And when he hath the kernel eat,

1

Who doth not fling away the shell?

LOVE'S GROWTH.

SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure

Vicissitude and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make 't more.

But if this medicine love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mix'd of all stuffs, vexing soul or sense,
And of the Sun his active vigour borrow,
Love's not so pure an abstract, as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their Muse;
But, as all else, being elemented too,

Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown;
As in the firmament

Stars by the Sun are not enlarg'd, but shown.
Gentle love-deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love's awakened root do bud out now.

LOVE'S EXCHANGE.

Love, any devil else but you

Would for a giv'n soul give something too;
At court your fellows every day

Give th' art of rhyming, huntmanship, or play,
For them, which were their own before;
Only I've nothing, which gave more,
But am, alas! by being lowly lower.

I ask no dispensation now
To falsify a tear, a sigh, a vow,
I do not sue from thee to draw
A non obstante on Nature's law;
These are prerogatives, they inhere
In thee and thine; none should forswear,
Except that he Love's minion were,

Give me thy weakness, make me blind

Both ways, as thou, and thine, in eyes and mind:
Love! let me never know that this

Is love, or that love childish is.
Let me not know that others know
That she knows my pains, lest that so

A tender shame make me mine own new woe.

If thou give nothing, yet thou 'rt just, Because I would not thy first motions trust: Small towns which stand stiff, till great shot Enforce them, by war's law condition not; Such in love's warfare is my case,

I may not article for grace,

Having put Love at last to show this face.

This face, by which he could command
And change th' idolatry of any land;
This face, which, wheresoe'er it comes,

Can call vow'd men from cloisters, dead from tombs,
And melt both poles at once, and store

Deserts with cities, and make more

Mines in the earth, than quarries were before.

For this Love is enrag'd with me,

Yet kills not; if I must example be

To future rebels; if th' unborn

Must learn, by my being cut up and torn;
Kill and dissect me, Love! for this
Torture against thine own end is,
Rack'd carcasses make ill anatomies.

CONFINED LOVE.

SOME man, unworthy to be possessor, Of old or new love, himself being false or weak, Thought his pain and shame would be lesser If on womankind he might his anger wreak,

SOME that have deeper digg'd Love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie:
I've lov'd, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery;
Oh, 't is imposture all:

And as no chymic yet th' elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

So lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I; if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play!
That loving wretch that swears,

'T is not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,

Would swear as justly, that he hears,

In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. Hope not for mind in women; at their best Sweetness and wit, they 're but mummy possest.

THE CURSE.

WHOEVER guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows
Who is my mistress, wither by this curse;
Him only for his purse

May some dull whore to love dispose,
And then yield unto all that are his foes;
May he be scorn'd by one, whom all else scorn,
Forswear to others, what to her h' hath sworn,
With fear of missing, shame of getting torn.

THE BAIT.

COME, live with me, and be my love, nd we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines and silver hooks.

There will the river whisp'ring run,
Warm'd by thine eyes more than the Sun:
And there th' enamour'd fish will play,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou to be so seen art loath

By Sun or Moon, thou darken'st both;
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cat their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset,
With strangling snare, or winding net:

Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest, Or curious traitors sleave silk flies, Bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes :

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait; That fish, that is not catch'd thereby, Alas! is wiser far than I.

Who will believe me, if I swear
That I have had the plague a year?

Who would not laugh at me, if I should say,
I saw a flash of powder burn a day?

Ah! what a trifle is a heart,

If once into Love's hands it come! All other griefs allow a part

To other griefs, aud ask themselves but some. They come to us, but us Love draws,

He swallows us and never chaws:

By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die; He is the tyrant pike, and we the fry.

If 't were not so, what did become

Of my heart, when I first saw thee?

I brought a heart into the room,

But from the room I carried none with me:
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thine heart to show
More pity unto me: but Love, alas,
At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,

Nor any place be empty quite, Therefore I think my breast hath all

Those pieces still, though they do not unite: And now as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so

My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love can love no more.

THE APPARITION.

WHEN by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead,
And thou shalt think thee free

Of all solicitation from me,

Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,

And thee feign'd vestal in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art, being tir'd before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,

And in a false sleep even from thee shrink.
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I

What I will say, I will not tell thee now,

Lest that preserve thee: and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
Than by my threatnings rest still innocent.

THE

BROKEN HEART.

He is stark mad, whoever says
That he hath been in love an hour,

Yet not that love so soon decays,

But that it can ten in less space devour ;

VALEDICTION

FORBIDDING MOURNING.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No;"

So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move, 'T were profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' Earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Of absence, 'cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so far refin'd,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,

Careless eyes, lips, and hands, to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run, Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

THE

ECSTASY.

WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,

A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest The violet's declining head,

Sat we on one another's breast. Our hands were firmly cemented

By a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string:
So to engraft our hands as yet

Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As twixt two equal armies fate
Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which, to advance our state,
Were gone out) bung 'twixt her and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay,
All day the same our postures were,
And we said nothing all the day
If any, so by love refin'd,

That he souls' language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,

Within convenient distance stood,

He (though he knew not which soul spake, Because both meant, both spake, the same) Might thence a new concoction take,

And part far purer than he came. This ecstasy doth unperplex

(We said) and tell us what we love, We see by this, it was not sex,

We see, we saw not what did move : But as all several souls contain

Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,

The strength, the colour, and the size
(All which before was poor and scant)
Redoubles still and multiplies.
When love with one another so

Interanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loveliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are compos'd and made:
For the atoms, of which we grow,

Are soul, whom no change can invade.

But, O, alas! so long, so far

Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we, we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres,
We owe them thanks because they thus
Did us to us at first convey,
Yielded their sense's force to us,

Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man Heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air,
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit

That subtle knot, which makes us man; So must pure lovers' souls descend T'affections and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies;
T' our bodies turn we then, and so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look ;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is the book;
And if some lover, such as we,

Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see