2 Were her tresses angel gold,
If a stranger may be bold,
Unrebuked, unafraid,
To convert them to a braid,
And with little more ado
Work them into bracelets, too;
If the mine be grown so free,
What care I how rich it be?
3 Were her hand as rich a prize
As her hairs, or precious eyes,
If she lay them out to take
Kisses, for good manners' sake,
And let every lover skip
From her hand unto her lip;
If she seem not chaste to me,
What care I how chaste she be?
4 No; she must be perfect snow,
In effect as well as show;
Warming but as snow-balls do,
Not like fire, by burning too;
But when she by change hath got
To her heart a second lot,
Then if others share with me,
Farewell her, whate'er she be!
JOSHUA SYLVESTER.
Joshua Sylvester is the next in the list of our imperfectly-known, but real poets. Very little is known of his history. He was a merchant- adventurer, and died at Middleburg, aged fifty-five, in 1618. He is said to have applied, in 1597, for the office of secretary to a trading company in Stade, and to have been, on this occasion, patronised by the Earl of Essex. He was at one time attached to the English Court as a pensioner of Prince Henry. He is said to have been driven abroad by the severity of his satires. He seems to have had a sweet flow of conversational eloquence, and hence was called 'The Silver-tongued.' He was an eminent linguist, and wrote his dedications in various languages. He published a large volume of poems, very unequal in their value, and inserted in it 'The Soul's Errand,' with interpolations, as we have seen, which prove it not to be his own. His great work is the translation of the 'Divine Weeks and Works' of the French poet, Du Bartas, which is a marvellous medley of flatness and force—of childish weakness and soaring genius—with more seed poetry in it than any poem we remember, except 'Festus,' the chaos of a hundred poetic worlds. There can be little doubt that Milton was familiar with this work in boyhood, and many remarkable coincidences have been pointed out between it and 'Paradise Lost.' Sylvester was a Puritan, and his publisher, Humphrey Lownes, who lived in the same street with Milton's father, belonged to the same sect; and, as Campbell remarks, 'it is easily to be conceived that Milton often repaired to the shop of Lownes, and there met with the pious didactic poem.' The work, therefore, some specimens of which we subjoin, is interesting, both in itself, and as having been the prima stamina of the great masterpiece of English poetry.
TO RELIGION.
1 Religion, O thou life of life,
How worldlings, that profane thee rife,
Can wrest thee to their appetites!
How princes, who thy power deny,
Pretend thee for their tyranny,
And people for their false delights!
2 Under thy sacred name, all over,
The vicious all their vices cover;
The insolent their insolence,
The proud their pride, the false their fraud,
The thief his theft, her filth the bawd,
The impudent, their impudence.
3 Ambition under thee aspires,
And Avarice under thee desires;
Sloth under thee her ease assumes,
Lux under thee all overflows,
Wrath under thee outrageous grows,
All evil under thee presumes.
4 Religion, erst so venerable,
What art thou now but made a fable,
A holy mask on folly's brow,
Where under lies Dissimulation,
Lined with all abomination.
Sacred Religion, where art thou?