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EMBLEM I. BOOK III.

My soul hath desired thee in the night.-ISAIAH, xxvi. 6.

GOOD God what horrid darkness doth surround
My groping soul! how are my senses bound
In utter shades; and muffled from the light,
Lurk in the bosom of eternal night!

The bold-faced lamp of heaven can set and rise,
And with his morning glory fill the eyes
Of gazing mortals; his victorious ray

Can chase the shadows and restore the day :
Night's bashful empress, though she often wane,
As oft repents her darkness, primes again;
And with her circling horns doth re-embrace
Her brother's wealth, and orbs her silver face.
But, ah! my sun, deep swallow'd in his fall,
Is set, and cannot shine, nor rise at all:
My bankrupt wain can beg nor borrow light;
Alas! my darkness is perpetual night.
Falls have their risings; wanings have their primes,
And desperate sorrows wait their better times :
Ebbs have their floods; and autumns have their
springs;

All states have changes, hurried with the swings
Of chance and time, still riding to and fro :
Terrestrial bodies, and celestial too.
How often have I vainly groped about,
With lengthen'd arms, to find a passage out,
That I might catch those beams mine eye desires,
And bathe my soul in these celestial fires!
Like as the haggard, cloistered in her mew,
To scour her downy robes, and to renew
Her broken flags, preparing t' overlook
The timorous mallard at the sliding brook,

Jets oft from perch to perch; from stock to ground,
From ground to window, thus surveying round
Her dove-befeather'd prison, till at length
Calling her noble birth to mind, and strength
Whereto her wing was born, her ragged beak
Nips off her jangling jesses, strives to break
Her jingling fetters, and begins to bate
At every glimpse, and darts at every grate :
E'en so my weary soul, that long has been
An inmate in this tenement of sin,
Lock'd up by cloud-brow'd error, which invites
My cloister'd thoughts to feed on black delights,
Now suns her shadows, and begins to dart
Her wing'd desires at thee, that only art
The sun she seeks, whose rising beams can fright
These dusky clouds that make so dark a night :
Shine forth, great glory, shine; that I may see,
Both how to loathe myself, and honour thee:
But if my weakness force thee to deny

Thy flames, yet lend the twilight of thine eye!
If I must want those beams I wish, yet grant
That I at least may wish those beams I want.

SONG.

To the tune of-Cuckolds all a-row.

KNOW then, my brethren, heaven is clear,
And all the clouds are gone ;

The righteous now shall flourish, and
Good days are coming on:

Come then, my brethren, and be glad,

And eke rejoice with me ;

Lawn sleeves and rochets shall go down, And hey! then up go we!

We'll break the windows which the Whore
Of Babylon hath painted,

And when the popish saints are down,
Then Barrow shall be sainted.
There's neither cross nor crucifix

Shall stand for men to see;

Rome's trash and trumperies shall go down, And hey! then up go we!

We'll down with all the 'Varsities,
Where learning is profest,
Because they practise and maintain

The language of the beast.
We'll drive the doctors out of doors,

And arts, whate'er they be ;
We'll cry both arts and learning down,
And hey! then up go we!

If once that Antichristian crew

Be crush'd and overthrown,
We'll teach the nobles how to crouch,
And keep the gentry down.

Good manners have an ill report,
And turn to pride, we see ;

We'll therefore cry good manners down,
And hey! then up go we!

The name of lord shall be abhorr'd,

For every man's a brother;
No reason why, in church or state,
One may should rule another.
But when the change of government
Shall set our fingers free,
We'll make the wanton sisters stoop,
And hey! then up go we!

Our cobblers shall translate their souls
From caves obscure and shady;
We'll make Tom T as good as my lord,
And Joan as good as my lady.
We'll crush and fling the marriage ring
Into the Roman see;

We'll ask no bands, but e'en clap hands,
And hey then up go we!

WILLIAM BROWNE.

[Born, 1590. Died, 1645.]

WILLIAM BROWNE was the son of a gentleman of Tavistock, in Devonshire. He was educated at Oxford, and went from thence to the Inner Temple, but devoted himself chiefly to poetry. In his twenty-third year he published the first part of his Britannia's Pastorals, prefaced by poetical eulogies, which evince his having been, at that early period of life, the friend and favourite of Selden and Drayton. To these testimonies he afterwards added that of Ben Jonson. In the following year he published the Shepherd's Pipe, of which the fourth eclogue is often said to have been the precursor of Milton's Lycidas. A single simile about a rose constitutes all the resemblance! In 1616 he published the second part of his Britannia's Pastorals. His Masque of the Inner Temple was never printed, till Dr. Farmer transcribed it from a MS. of the Bodleian library, for Thomas Davies's edition of Browne's works, more than 120 years after the author's death.

He seems to have taken his leave of the Muses about the prime of his life, and returned to Oxford, in the capacity of tutor to Robert Dormer, Earl of Caernarvon, who fell in the battle of Newbury, 1643. After leaving the university with that nobleman, he found a liberal patron in William, Earl of Pembroke, whose character, like that of Caernarvon, still lives among the warmly coloured and minutely touched portraits of Lord Clarendon. The poet lived in Lord Pembroke's family; and, according to Wood, grew rich in his employment. But the particulars of his history are very imperfectly known, and his verses deal too little with the business of life to throw much light upon his circumstances. His poetry is not without beauty; but it is the beauty of mere landscape and allegory, without the manners and passions that constitute human interest.

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ADDRESS TO HIS NATIVE SOIL.

HAIL thou, my native soil! thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Show me who can ? so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-clothed vallies, or aspiring hills,
Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy
mines,

Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines:
And if the earth can show the like again,
Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men.
Time never can produce men to o'ertake
The fames of Grenville, Davis, Gilbert, Drake,
Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more,
That by their power made the Devonian shore
Mock the proud Tagus; for whose richest spoil
The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soil
Bankrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost
By winning this, though all the rest were lost.

EVENING.

As in an evening when the gentle air
Breathes to the sullen night a soft repair,
I oft have sat on Thames' sweet bank to hear
My friend with his sweet touch to charm mine ear,
When he hath play'd (as well he can) some strain
That likes me, straight I ask the same again,
And he as gladly granting, strikes it o'er
With some sweet relish was forgot before:
I would have been content, if he would play,
In that one strain to pass the night away;
But fearing much to do his patience wrong,
Unwillingly have ask'd some other song:
So in this diff'ring key though I could well
A many hours but as few minutes tell,

Yet lest mine own delight might injure you
(Though loath so soon) I take my song anew.

FROM BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS. BOOK II. SONG V.

BETWEEN two rocks (immortal, without mother)*
That stand as if outfacing one another,
There ran a creek up, intricate and blind,
As if the waters hid them from the wind,
Which never wash'd but at a higher tide
The frizzled cotes which do the mountains hide,
Where never gale was longer known to stay
Than from the smooth wave it had swept away
The new divorced leaves, that from each side
Left the thick boughs to dance out with the tide.

This description coincides very strikingly with the scenery of the Tamar, in Devonshire. Browne, who was a native of that county, must have studied it from na

ture.

At further end the creek, a stately wood
Gave a kind shadow (to the brackish flood)
Made up of trees, not less ken'd by each skiff
Than that sky-scaling peak of Teneriffe,
Upon whose tops the hernshew bred her young,
And hoary moss upon their branches hung;
Whose rugged rinds sufficient were to show,
Without their height, what time they 'gan to grow.
And if dry eld by wrinkled skin appears,
None could allot them less than Nestor's years.
As under their command the thronged creek
Ran lessen'd up. Here did the shepherd seek
Where he his little boat might safely hide,
Till it was fraught with what the world beside
Could not outvalue; nor give equal weight
Though in the time when Greece was at her height.

Yet that their happy voyage might not be Without time's short'ner, heav'n-taught melody (Music that lent feet to the stable woods, And in their currents turn'd the mighty floods, Sorrow's sweet nurse, yet keeping joy alive, Sad discontent's most welcome corrosive, The soul of art, best loved when love is by, The kind inspirer of sweet poesy,

Least thou shouldst wanting be, when swans would fain

Have sung one song, and never sung again)
The gentle shepherd, hasting to the shore,
Began this lay, and timed it with his oar.

Nevermore let holy Dee

O'er other rivers brave, Or boast how (in his jollity)

Kings row'd upon his wave. But silent be, and ever know That Neptune for my fare would row.

Swell then, gently swell, ye floods, As proud of what ye bear, And nymphs that in low coral woods String pearls upon your hair, Ascend; and tell if ere this day A fairer prize was seen at sea.

See the salmons leap and bound
To please us as we pass,
Each mermaid on the rocks around
Lets fall her brittle glass,
As they their beauties did despise
And loved no mirror but your eyes,

Blow, but gently blow, fair wind,
From the forsaken shore,
And be as to the halcyon kind,

Till we have ferried o'er :

So may'st thou still have leave to blow, And fan the way where she shall go.

THOMAS NABBES.

[Died, 1645.]

THIS was an inferior dramatist in the time of Charles I. who, besides his plays, wrote a continuation of Knolles's History of the Turks. He seems to have been secretary or domestic to some

nobleman or prelate, at or near Worcester. He had a share in the poetical collection called Fancy's Theatre, with Tatham, Richard Brome, and others.

FROM "MICROCOSMUS, A MASQUE." 1637.

SONG BY LOVE AND THE VIRTUES TO PHYSANDER AND BELLANIMA.

WELCOME, Welcome, happy pair,
To these abodes, where spicy air
Breathes perfumes, and every sense
Doth find his object's excellence;
Where's no heat, nor cold extreme,

No winter's ice, no summer's scorching beam;
Where's no sun, yet never night,
Day always springing from eternal light.

Chorus. All mortal sufferings laid aside, Here in endless bliss abide.

Love. Welcome to Love, my new-loved heir,
Elysium's thine, ascend my chair :
For following sensuality

I thought to disinherit thee;
But being now reform'd in life,
And reunited to thy wife,

Mine only daughter, fate allows

That Love with stars should crown your brows.
Join ye that were his guides to this,
Thus I enthrone you both-now kiss ;
Whilst you in endless measures move,
Led on to endless joys by Love.

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

[Died, 1649.]

THOMAS HEYWOOD was the most prolific writer in the most fertile age of our drama*. In the midst of his theatrical labours as an actor and poet, he composed a formidable list of prose works, and defended the stage against the puritans, in a work that is full of learning. One of his projects was to write the lives of all poets that were ever distinguished, from the time of Homer downwards. Yet it has happened to the framer of this gigantic design to have no historian so kind to his own memory as to record either the period of his death, or the spot that covers his remains. His merits entitled him to better remembrance. He composed indeed with a careless rapidity, and seems to have thought as little of Horace's precept of " sæpe stylum vertas” as of most of the injunctions in the Art of Poetry. But he possesses considerable power of interesting the affections, by placing his plain and familiar characters in affecting situations. The worst of him is, that his common-place sentiments

[* He had, as he himself tells us, "either an entire hand, or at the least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays." He was a native of Lincolnshire.]

and plain incidents fall not only beneath the ideal beauty of art, but are often more fatiguing than what we meet with in the ordinary and unselected circumstances of life. When he has hit upon those occasions where the passions should obviously rise with accumulated expression, he lingers on through the scene with a dull and level indifference. The term artlessness may be applied to Heywood in two very opposite senses. His pathos is often artless in the better meaning of the word, because its objects are true to life, and their feelings naturally expressed. But he betrays still more frequently an artlessness, or we should rather call it, a want of art, in deficiency of contrivance. His best performance is, "A Woman killed with Kindness." In that play the repentance of Mrs. Frankford, who dies of a broken heart, for her infidelity to a generous husband, would present a situation consummately moving, if we were left to conceive her death to be produced simply by grief. But the poet most unskilfully prepares us for her death, by her declaring her intentions to starve herself; and mars, by the weakness, sin, and horror of suicide,

an example of penitence that would otherwise be sublimely and tenderly edifying. The scene of the death of Mrs. Frankford has been deservedly noticed for its pathos by an eminent foreign critic, Mr. Schlegel*, who also commends the superior force of its inexorable morality to the reconciling conclusion of Kotzebue's drama on a similar subject. The learned German perhaps draws his inference too rigidly. Mrs. Frank

ford's crime was recent, and her repentance and death immediately follow it; but the guilt of the other tragic penitent, to whom Mr. S. alludes, is more remote, and less heinous; and to prescribe interminable limits, either in real or imaginary life, to the generosity of individual forgiveness, is to invest morality with terrors, which the frailty of man and the mercy of Heaven do not justify.

SCENE IN THE TRAGEDY "A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS."

Grief of Frankford, after discovering his wife's infidelity, and dismissing her.

Enter CRANWEL, FRANKFORD, and NICHOLAS. Cran. WHY do you search each room about your house,

Now that you have dispatch'd your wife away?
Fran. O sir, to see that nothing may be left,
That ever was my wife's: I loved her dearly,
And when I do but think of her unkindness,
My thoughts are all in hell; to avoid which torment,
I would not have a bodkin or a cuff,
A bracelet, necklace, or rebato wier;
Nor any thing that ever was call'd her's,
Left me, by which I might remember her.
Seek round about.

[corner.

Nic. Master, here's her lute flung in a Fran. Her lute? Oh God! upon this instrument Her fingers have ran quick division, Swifter than that which now divides our hearts. These frets have made me pleasant, that have now Frets of my heart-strings made. Omaster Cranwel, Oft hath she made this melancholy wood (Now mute and dumb for her disastrous chance) Speak sweetly many a note; sound many a strain To her own ravishing voice, which being well strung, What pleasant strange airs have they jointly rung? Post with it after her; now nothing's left; Of her and her's I am at once bereft.

*

NICHOLAS Overtakes MRS. FRANKFORD with her lute. Nic. There.

Anne. I know the lute; oft have I sung to thee: We both are out of tune, both out of time.

Nic. My master commends him unto ye; there's all he can find that was ever yours: he hath nothing left that ever you could lay claim to but his own heart, and he could not afford you that. All that I have to deliver you is this; he prays you to forget him, and so he bids you farewell.

Anne. I thank him; he is kind, and ever was. All you that have true feeling of my grief, That know my loss, and have relenting hearts, Gird me about; and help me, with your tears, To wash my spotted sins: my lute shall groan; It cannot weep, but shall lament my moan.

* Mr. Schlegel, however, is mistaken in speaking of him as anterior to Shakspeare, evidently confounding him with an older poet of the name.

FROM THE SAME. Death of Mrs. Frankford.

Persons. MR. MALBY, MRS. ANNE FRANKFORD, FRANK-
FORD, SIR CHArles MountFORD, SIR FRANCIS ACTON.
Mal. How fare you, Mrs. Frankford?
Anne. Sick, sick, oh sick: Give me some air. I
pray

Tell me, oh tell me, where's Mr. Frankford?
Will he not deign to see me ere I die?

Mal. Yes, Mrs. Frankford: divers gentlemen
Your loving neighbours, with that just request
Have moved and told him of your weak estate:
Who, though with much ado to get belief,
Examining of the general circumstance,
Seeing your sorrow and your penitence,
And hearing therewithal the great desire
You have to see him ere you left the world,
He gave to us his faith to follow us,
And sure he will be here immediately.

Anne. You have half revived me with the pleasing news:

Raise me a little higher in my bed.

Blush I not, brother Acton? Blush I not, sir
Charles?

Can you not read my fault writ in my cheek!
Is not my crime there? tell me, gentlemen.

Char. Alas! good mistress, sickness hath not left you

Blood in your face enough to make you blush. Anne. Then sickness, like a friend, my fault would hide.

Is my husband come? My soul but tarries
His arrival, then I am fit for heaven.

Acton. I came to chide you, but my words of hate

Are turn'd to pity and compassionate grief.
I came to rate you, but my brawls, you see,
Melt into tears, and I must weep by thee.
Here's Mr. Frankford now.

Enter FRANKFORD.

Fran. Good-morrow, brother; morrow, gentle

men!

God, that hath laid this cross upon our heads, Might (had he pleased) have made our cause of

meeting

On a more fair and more contented ground:
But he that made us, made us to this woe.
Anne. And is he come? Methinks that voice
Fran. How do you, woman?
[I know.

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