My sense is passion's spy; My thoughts like ruins old, Which show how fair the building was, While grace did it uphold. And still before mine eyes Whom grace and virtue once advanced, O thoughts, no thoughts, but wounds, Sometime the store of quiet rest, I sowed the soil of peace; To nettles now my corn, The peace, the rest, the life, Were happy lot, but by their loss So to unhappy men The best frames to the worst: In was stands my delight; In is and shall, my woe; My horror fastened in the yea; Unworthy of relief, That craved is too late, Too late I find, I find too well, Behold, such is the end That Pleasure doth procure; Forsaken first by Grace, By Pleasure now forgotten, Her pain I feel, but Grace's wage Have others from me gotten. Then, Grace, where is the joy That makes thy torments sweet? Where is the cause that many thought Their deaths through thee but meet? Where thy disdain of sin, Thy sparks of bliss, thy heavenly joys, O that they were not lost, O that a dream of feigned loss O frail inconstant flesh, Soon trapped in every gin! Soon wrought thus to betray thy soul, And plunge thyself in sin! Yet hate I but the fault, To moan a sinner's case, Yet God's must I remain, By death, by wrong, by shame; I cannot blot out of my heart That Grace writ in His name. I cannot set at nought Whom I have held so dear; I cannot make Him seem afar, That is indeed so near. Not that I look henceforth Yet that shall never fail Which my faith bare in hand; But since that I have sinned, The solitary wood My city shall become; The darkest dens shall be my lodge; In which I rest or come; A sandy plot my board, My tears shall be my wine, My harmony the serpent's hiss, The screeching owl my clock. My exercise, remorse, And doleful sinners' lays; My book, remembrance of my crimes, And faults of former days. My walk, the path of plaint; Where Judas and his cursed crew And though I seem to use Yet is my grief not feigned, Wherein I starve and pine; Who feels the most shall think it least, XXI. WHO GRACE FOR ZENITH HAD.1 ANOTHER ADAPTATION OF SIR E. DYER'S FANCY. (By Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Born 1554; ZHO grace for zenith had, W From which no shadows grow, Whose love beloved hath been If from this heavenly state, Let him lament with me; And thence fallen down to woe. "Cœlica," Sonnet LXXXIII, in Lord Brooke's "Works," 1683, pp. 228-233. |