| |
August 1614
FAIR, great, and good, since seeing you we see | |
| What heaven can do, what any 1 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 | 5 |
| 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, | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| Court, 2 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 | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| 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— | 30 |
| 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, 3 virtue, understood; | |
| If in this sacrifice of mine be shown | 35 |
| 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, | 40 |
| He might have said the best that he could say | |
| Of those fair creatures which were made that day; | |
| And when next day he had admired the birth | |
| Of sun, moon, stars, fairer than late-prais’d earth, | |
| He might have said the best that he could say, | 45 |
| And not be chid for praising yesterday; | |
| So though some things are not together true, | |
| As, that another’s worthiest, and, that you; | |
| Yet, to say so, doth not condemn a man, | |
| If, when he spoke them, they were both true then. | 50 |
| How fair a proof of this in our soul grows; | |
| We first have souls of growth and sense; and those, | |
| When our last soul, our soul immortal, came, | |
| Were swallow’d into it, and have no name. | |
| Nor doth he injure those souls, which doth cast | 55 |
| The power and praise of both them on the last; | |
| No more do I wrong any, if I adore | |
| The same things now which I adored before, | |
| The subject changed, and measure; the same thing | |
| In a low constable, and in the king | 60 |
| I reverence, his power to work on me. | |
| So did I humbly reverence each degree | |
| Of fair, great, good, but more, now I am come | |
| From having found their walks, to find their home. | |
| And as I owe my first souls thanks, that they | 65 |
| For my last soul did fit and mould my clay, | |
| So am I debtor unto them, whose worth | |
| Enabled me to profit, and take forth | |
| This new great lesson, thus to study you; | |
| Which none, not reading others first, could do. | 70 |
| Nor lack I light to read this book, though I | |
| In a dark cave, yea, in a grave do lie; | |
| For as your fellow-angels, so you do | |
| Illustrate them who come to study you. | |
| The first whom we in histories do find | 75 |
| To have profess’d all arts, was one born blind; | |
| He lack’d those eyes beasts have as well as we, | |
| Not those by which angels are seen and see. | |
| So, though I’m born without those eyes to live, | |
| Which fortune, who hath none herself, doth give, | 80 |
| Which are fit means to see bright courts and you, | |
| Yet, may I see you thus, as now I do, | |
| I shall by that all goodness have discern’d, | |
| And though I burn my library, be learn’d. | |
