If they whom sacred love hath link'd in one,
Do, as they dance, in all their course of life;
Never shall burning grief, nor bitter moan,
Nor factious difference, nor unkind strife,
Arise betwixt the husband and the wife;
For whether forth, or back, or round he go,
As the man doth, so must the woman do.
What if, by often interchange of place
Sometimes the woman gets the upper hand?
That is but done for more delightful grace;
For on that part she doth not ever stand;
But as the measure's law doth her command,
She wheels about, and ere the dance doth end,
Into her former place she doth transcend.8
8 It is remarkable that Sir John Davies should have written this Poem, which he entitled the Orchestra, and that very remarkable and beautiful one on the Immortality of the Soul.
This poem of Sir John Davies's could not have been unknown to Burton, for Burton read every thing; but it must have escaped his memory, otherwise he who delighted in quotations and quoted so well, would have introduced some of his stanzas, when he himself was treating of the same subject and illustrated it with some of the same similitudes. “The Sun and Moon, some say,” (says he) “dance about the earth; the three upper planets about the Sun as their centre, now stationary, now direct, now retrograde, now in apogæo, then in perigæo, now swift, then slow; occidental, oriental, they turn round, jump and trace ♀ and ☿ about the Sun, with those thirty-three Maculæ or Burbonian planets, circa Solem saltantes cytharedum, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter, two Austrian about Saturn, &c. and all belike to the music of the spheres.”
Sir Thomas Browne had probably this passage in his mind, when he said “acquaint thyself with the choragium of the stars.”
“The whole matter of the Universe and all the parts thereof,” says Henry More, “are ever upon motion, and in such a dance as whose traces backwards and forwards take a vast compass; and what seems to have made the longest stand, must again move, according to the modulations and accents of that Music, that is indeed out of the hearing of the acutest ears, but yet perceptible by the purest minds, and the sharpest wits. The truth whereof none would dare to oppose, if the breath of the gainsayer could but tell its own story, and declare through how many Stars and Vortices it has been strained, before the particles thereof met, to be abused to the framing of so rash a contradiction.”
CHAPTER CXC.
DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL's REMARKS ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.
Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere qualche particolarità anchor.