When we have filled the rundlets of our eyes
We'll issue 't forth and vent such elegies
As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas,
We floating islands, living Hebrides.
On the Memory of Mr. Edward King.] First printed in the memorial volume of Cambridge verse to King, 1638; included in the Poems of 1651. It is of course easy (and it may be feared that it has too often been done) to contrast this disadvantageously with Lycidas. A specific or generic comparison, bringing out the difference of ephemeral and eternal style in verse, will not be found unprofitable and is almost as easy to make. No reader of Milton—and any one who has not read Milton is very unlikely to read this—can need information on King or on the circumstances of his death. 1651 and 1653 add a spurious duplicate, the last fourteen lines of W. More's elegy which followed Cleveland's in the Cambridge volume.
* On the Same.
Tell me no more of Stoics: canst thou tell
Who 'twas that when the waves began to swell,
The ship to sink, sad passengers to call
'Master, we perish'—slept secure of all?