The pride of all thy victory
Will sleep with me;
And they who should attest thy glory,
Will, or forget, or not believe this story.
Then to increase thy triumph, let me rest,
40Since by thine eye slain, buried in thy breast.
The Tomb.] Brydges, though thinking the end of this poem 'a feeble conceit', admits that 'there are passages in it that are more than pretty'. It is certainly one of Stanley's best, and he seems to have taken some trouble with it. In 1651 he dropped the bracketed stanza 3 and substituted the text for the last couplet of stanza 2, which reads in 1647:
And (thou in this fire sacrificed to me)
We might each other's mutual martyr be.
In the last line of the omitted stanza 'love' is certainly wrong, and Miss Guiney's suggestion of 'kill' is almost certissima. But she seems to have had a different copy of 1647 before her from that which I collated, for she does not notice a variant, or set of variants, in ll. 37-9: