To mingle beauty with infirmities.
And pure perfection with impure defeature;
Making it subject to the tyranny

Of mad mischances and much misery ;

'As burning fevers, agues pale and faint,
Life-poisoning pestilence, and frenzies wood,1
The marrow-eating sickness, whose attaint
Disorder breeds by heating of the blood:

Surfeits, imposthumes, grief, and damn'd despair, Swear Nature's death for framing thee so fair.

And not the least of all these maladies,

But in one minute's fight brings beauty under:
Both favor, savor, hue, and qualities,

Whereat the impartial gazer late did wonder,

Are on the sudden wasted, thaw'd, and done, As mountain snow melts with the midday sun.

Therefore, despite of fruitless chastity,
Love-lacking vestals, and self-loving nuns,
That on the earth would breed a scarcity,
And barren dearth of daughters and of sons,
Be prodigal: the lamp that burns by night
Dries up his oil, to lend the world his light.

• What is thy body but a swallowing grave. Seeming to bury that posterity,

1 Mad.

Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?

If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
Sithin thy pride so fair a hope is slain.

So in thyself thyself art made away:

A mischief worse than civil home-bred strife;
Or theirs, whose desperate hands themselves do

slay;

Or butcher-sire, that reaves his son of life.

Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets
But gold that's put to use, more gold begets.'

Nay, then,' quoth Adon, you will fall again Into your idle over-handled theme:

The kiss I gave you is bestow'd in vain,

And all in vain you strive against the stream:

;

For, by this black-faced night, desire's foul

nurse,

Your treatise makes me like you worse and

worse.

If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues, And eyery tongue more moving than your own, Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs; Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown : For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear, And will not let a false sound enter there;

Since.

'Lest the deceiving harmony should run
Into the quiet closure of my breast;
And then my little heart were quite undone,
In his bedchamber to be barr'd of rest.

No, lady, no; my heart longs not to groan;
But soundly sleeps, while now it sleeps alone.

'What have you urged that I cannot reprove?
The path is smooth that leadeth on to danger:
I hate not love; but your device in love,
That lends embracements unto every stranger.
You do it for increase; O, strange excuse!
When reason is the bawd to lust's abuse.

Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled, Since sweating Lust on earth usurp'd his name; Under whose simple semblance he hath fed

Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;

Which the hot tyrant stains, and soon bereaves, As caterpillars do the tender leaves.

'Love comforteth, like sunshine after rain,
But lust's effect is tempest after sun;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not; lust like a glutton dies:
Love is all truth; lust full of forged lies.

'More I could tell, but more I dare not say: The text is old, the orator too green.

Therefore, in sadness, now I will away;
My face is full of shame, my heart of teen: 1
Mine ears, that to your wanton talk attended.
Do burn themselves for having so offended.'

With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark lawnd runs
apace;

Leaves Love upon her back deeply distress'd.

Look, how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye;

Which after him she darts, as one on shore
Gazing upon a late-embarked friend,

Till the wild waves will have him seen no more,
Whose ridges with the meeting clouds contend;
So did the merciless and pitchy night
Fold in the object that did feed her sight:

Whereat amazed, as one that unaware
Hath droop'd a precious jewel in the flood,
Or 'stonish'd as night-wanderers often are,
Their light blown out in some mistrustful wood;
Even so confounded in the dark she lay,
Having lost the fair discovery of her way.

¡ Sorrow.

Lawnd and lawn were synonymous at the time of our author.

And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans ·
That all the neighbor caves, as seeming troubled,
Make verbal repetition of her moans;

Passion on passion deeply is redoubled :

Ah me!' she cries; and twenty times, Woe, woe!'

And twenty echoes twenty times cry so.

She, marking them, begins a wailing note,

And sings extemporally a woful ditty;

How love makes young men thrall, and old men

dote ;

How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty.

Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe,
And still the choir of echoes answer so.

Her song was tedious, and outwore the night,
For lovers' hours are long, though seeming short:
If pleased themselves, others, they think, delight
In such like circumstance, with such like sport:
Their copious stories, oftentimes begun,
End without audience, and are never done.

For who hath she to spend the night withal,
But idle sounds resembling parasites,

Like shrill-tongued tapsters answering every call,
Soothing the humor of fantastic wits?

'Tis so;' they answer all, Tis

And would say after her, if she said No.