YET ne’ertheless would I make holiday;
Exchange love’s martyrdom; be light of heart;
Take note of others who enjoy love’s art;
Make measurable sport of what I may;
Seek men and women who are blithe and gay;
Forget the past and love’s more cruel mart,
Wherein doth sorrow play so large a part;
And mirror life in a more mirthful way.
Oh! that I might be now the youth I was,
Before love’s mastery enslaved my soul:
Free in my fancy, free from life’s stern laws,
When love of life alone was my heart’s goal.
Then hath it need of holiday, because
For long it heareth nightly love’s dirge toll.
CXV
OH! well have I examined my defect,
And all my faults and follies, yet anew
(Knowing, alas, too well, they be not few),
And marshalled them, that I may thus detect,
Which fault or folly love doth not protect,
And which would separate my heart from you.
From some like cause ’twould seem you must eschew
This proffered courtship, and my love reject.
Then tell me, dear, the which I do adjure
Your honor and your honesty to name.
For ’tis my right, while my love doth endure,
To ask if fault or scandal shall proclaim
Its untoward presence, and your thought allure.
For lies should not kill love, nor hurt my fame.
CXVI
OH! what a thought hath filled my brain this night,
And burned my fevered brow, as I suspect
That all these years, the love thou didst reject
Was, through strange chance, belittled in thy sight
By some foul slander or some worldly wight.
Methinks some poisonous tongue doth intersect
Both love and friendship, and its shade reflect
Unseen upon me, like some evil sprite.
What’s this, that with a start I do behold,
As darkness cloaks me round in cold embrace?
Some goblin, born of fear, by fear made bold?
Some lie that lives, yet dares not show its face?
Some tale that knows ’tis false as soon as told?
Such company my love doth poorly grace.
CXVII
AND with the morn, though sunrise shall disperse
Those phantoms that dark hours oft have sought,
The spectral visage of some midnight thought
Doth still unite its poison to my verse.
In truth, suspicion makes a cruel nurse,
A poor companion, that the world hath brought
To tend the soul when, ill and overwrought,
It reaches by such means a stage still worse.
Let not my life, then, kill this tree of love,
Nor canker-worm destroy its fresh green leaf,
Nor moth devour its foliage from above;
So that its ruin shatter my belief
In love’s ideal and Cupid’s vernal grove.
For love that doth prove false must die of grief.
CXVIII
NOT every prince, nor king, nor emperor liveth,
After his years upon this earth pass by;
Not every painter’s brush, nor poet’s sigh
Bringeth to the world the passion that it giveth;
Not every sculptor’s chiselled stone outliveth
The fell destruction of time’s tenancy;
Nor men thought great, nor man’s inconstancy,
Commit the sins that life’s last court forgiveth,
Not such as these form that immortal band,
Whose names adorn the temples of past ages.
Nay, those decreed by nature to withstand
The deep emotions written o’er life’s pages.
Their thoughts with all mankind go hand in hand,
Their loves make one with genius and the sages.