SIMILE.
As when the cheerful sun elamping wide,
Glads all the world with his uprising ray,
And woos the widowed earth afresh to pride,
And paints her bosom with the flowery May—
His silent sister steals him quite way.
Wrapp’d in a sable cloud, from mortal eyes
The hasty stars at noon begin to rise,
And headlong to his early roost the sparrow flies.
But soon as he again disshadowed is,
Restoring the blind world his blemish’d sight—
As though another world were newly his;
The cozened birds busily take their flight,
And wonder at the shortness of the night,
So Mercy once again herself displays,
Out from her sister’s cloud, and open lays
Those sunshine looks, whose beams would dim a thousand days.
Giles Fletcher.