O, ’twas a moving Epicedium!
Can fire, can time, can blackest fate consume
So rare creation? No, ’tis thwart to sense;
Corruption quakes to touch such excellence;
Nature exclaims for justice, justice fate,—
Ought into nought can never remigrate.
Then look; for see what glorious issue, brighter
Than clearest fire, and beyond faith far whiter
Than Dian’s tier, now springs from yonder flame!
Let me stand numb’d with wonder; never came 10
So strong amazement on astonish’d eye
As this, this measureless pure rarity.
Lo, now, th’ extracture of Divinest essence,
The soul of Heaven’s laboured quintessence,
(Pæans to Phœbus!) your dear lover’s death
Takes sweet creation and all-blessing breath.
What strangeness is’t, that from the Turtle’s ashes
Assumes such form, whose splendour clearer flashes
Than mounted Delius? Tell me, genuine muse!
Now yield your aids, you spirits that infuse 20
A sacred rapture, light my weaker eye,
Raise my invention on swift fantasy;
That whilst of this same Metaphysical,
God, man, nor woman, but elix’d of all,
My labouring thoughts with strainèd ardour sing,
My muse may mount with an uncommon wing.
The Description of this Perfection.
Dares then thy too audacious sense
Presume define that boundless Ens,
That amplest thought transcendeth?
O yet vouchsafe, my muse, to greet
That wondrous rareness, in whose sweet
All praise begins and endeth.
Divinest Beauty! that was slightest,
That adorn’d this wondrous Brightest,
Which had nought to be corrupted.
In this perfection had no mean; 10
To this earth’s purest was unclean,
Which virtue even instructed.
By it all beings deck’d and stainèd,
Ideas that are idly feignèd
Only here subsist invested;
Dread not to give strain’d praise at all,
No speech is hyperbolical
To this Perfection blessèd.
Thus close my rhymes; this all that can be said,
This wonder never can be flatterèd. 20
To Perfection.—A Sonnet.
Oft have I gazèd with astonish’d eye
At monstrous issues of ill-shapèd birth,
When I have seen the midwife to old Earth,
Nature, produce most strange deformity.
So have I marvell’d to observe of late
Hard-favour’d feminines so scant of fair,
That masks so choicely shelter’d of the air,
As if their beauties were not theirs by fate.