Fair friend, 'tis true, your beauties move
My heart to a respect:
Too little to be paid with love,
Too great for your neglect.

I neither love, nor yet am free,
For though the flame I find
Be not intense in the degree,
'Tis on the purest kind.

It little wants of love, but pain,
Your beauty takes my sense,
And lest you should that price disdain,
My thoughts, too, feel the influence.

'Tis not a passion's first access
Ready to multiply,
But like love's calmest state it is
Possessed with victory.

1.

Madam, your beauty and your lovely parts
Would scarce admit poetick praise and Arts
As they are Loves most sharp and piercing darts;
Though, as again they only wound and kill
The more deprav'd affections of our will,
You claim a right to commendation still.

2.

For as you can unto that height refine
All Loves delights, as while they do incline
Unto no vice, they so become divine;
We may as well attain your excellence,

Lovely thing to see:, A
through the paper window's hole,
the Galaxy.

LOVE

An old Egyptian monarch, when his arms
Had girt the world, or what he knew thereof,
Wrote on his tomb, " All bow to woman's charms,
The greatest conquerer of the earth is Love. "

When Love flies in,
Make — make no sign;
Owl-soft his wings,
Sand-blind his eyne;
Sigh, if thou must,
But seal him thine.

Nor make no sign
If love flit out;
He'll tire of thee
Without a doubt.
Stifle thy pangs;
Thy heart resign;
And live without!

I strove with none for none was worth my strife;
Reason I loved, and next to reason, doubt;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life
And put it out.

Love is not blind. I see with single eye
Your ugliness and other women's grace.
I know the imperfection of your face, —
The eyes too wide apart, the brow too high
For beauty. Learned from earliest youth am I
In loveliness, and cannot so erase
Its letters from my mind, that I may trace
You faultless, I must love until I die.
More subtle is the sovereignty of love:
So am I caught that when I say, " Not fair, "
'Tis but as if I said, " Not here — not there —
Not risen — not writing letters. " Well I know

The wind blows out of the west,
The wind is merry and free;
It brings fair weather for us, love,
Fair weather for thee and me.

The sun shines out of the east,
And dances over the sea;
The world's aglitter for us, love,
Aglitter for thee and me.

And now the world's a-dusk,
The nest unstirred on the tree;
The fair moon hangs at its full, love,
And shineth for thee and me.

Toss not my soul, O Love, 'twixt hope and fear.
Show me some ground where I may firmly stand
Or surely fall; I care not which appear,
So one will close me in a certain band.

Take me, Assurance, to thy blissful hold,
Or thou, Despair, unto thy darkest cell.
Each hath full rest, the one in joys enrolled,
Th'other, in that he fears no more, is well.

Ye captive souls of blindfold Cyprian's boat,
Mark with advice in what estate ye stand:
Your boatman never whistles merry note,
And Folly keeping stern, still puts from land,
And makes a sport to toss you to and fro
Twixt sighing winds and surging waves of woe.

On Beauty's rock she runs you at her will,
And holds you in suspense twixt hope and fear,
Where dying oft, yet are you living still,
But such a life as death much better were.
Be therefore circumspect, and follow me,
When chance or change of manners sets you free.