Dear, Heaun-designed sovl!
Amongst the rest
Of suters that beseige your maiden brest,
Why may not I
My fortune try
And venture to speak one good word,
Not for my self, alas! but for my dearer Lord?
You have seen allready, in this lower sphear
Of froth and bubbles, what to look for here:
Say, gentle soul, what can you find
But painted shapes,
Peacocks and apes;
Illustrious flyes,
Guilded dunghills, glorious lyes;
Goodly surmises
And deep disguises,
Oathes of water, words of wind?
Trvth biddes me say 'tis time you cease to trust
Your soul to any son of dust.
'Tis time you listen to a brauer loue,
Which from aboue
Calls you vp higher
And biddes you come
And choose your roome
Among His own fair sonnes of fire;
Where you among
The golden throng
That watches at His palace doores
May passe along,
And follow those fair starres of your's;
Starrs much too fair and pure to wait vpon
The false smiles of a sublunary sun.
Sweet, let me prophesy that at last t'will proue
Your wary loue
Layes vp his purer and more pretious vowes,
And meanes them for a farre more worthy Spovse
Then this World of lyes can giue ye:
Eu'n for Him with Whom nor cost,
Nor loue, nor labour can be lost;
Him Who neuer will deceiue ye.
Let not my Lord, the mighty Louer
Of soules, disdain that I discouer
The hidden art
Of His high stratagem to win your heart:
It was His heaunly art
Kindly to cross you
In your mistaken loue;
That, at the next remoue
Thence, He might tosse you
And strike your troubled heart
Home to Himself; to hide it in His brest:
The bright ambrosiall nest
Of Loue, of life, and euerlasting rest.
Happy mystake!
That thus shall wake
Your wise soul, neuer to be wonne
Now with a loue below the sun.
Your first choyce failes; O when you choose agen
May it not be amongst the sonnes of men.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
The first line, 'To Mistress M.R.
Dear, Heav'n-designed soul,'
as in 1670, is not to be considered as an unrhymed line, but as the
address or superscription, though so contrived as not to interfere with
the metre, but to make a five-foot line with the two feet of the true
first line of the poem. So Parolles prefaces his verse with
'Dian, the count's a fool and full of gold.'
(All's Well that ends Well, iv. 3.)
and Longaville (Love's Labour Lost) prefixes to his sonnet,
'O sweet Maria, empress of my love.'