And then—across the gayety of the song—the deepening note of persuasion strikes a familiar chord:—
Come, let us go, while we are in our prime;
And take the harmless folly of the time!
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Passerat is no less insistent. The suitors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have dedicated the chill hours of early morning to their courtship. Nor was the custom purely pastoral and poetic. When Lovelace makes his appointments with Clarissa Harlowe at five A. M., the modern reader—if Richardson has a modern reader—is wont to think the hour an unpropitious one; but to Herrick and to the Pléiade it would have seemed rational enough.
Laissons le lit et le sommeil
Ceste journée:
Pour nous, l’Aurore au front vermeil
Est desjà née