Tell it how much his late desires I tender (If yet it know not), and to light surrender My soul's dark offspring, willing it should die To loves, to passions, and society. Sweet Hero, left upon her bed alone, Her maidenhead, her vows, Leander gone, And nothing with her but a violent crew Of new-come thoughts, that yet she never knew, Even to herself a stranger, was much like Th' Iberian city that War's hand did strike By English force in princely Essex' guide, When Peace assur'd her towers had fortified, And golden-finger'd India had bestow'd Such wealth on her, that strength and empire flow'd Into her turrets, and her virgin waist The wealthy girdle of the sea embrac'd; Till our Leander, that made Mars his Cupid, For soft love suits with iron thunders chid; Swum to her town, dissolv'd her virgin zone; Led in his power, and made Confusion Run through her streets amaz'd, that she suppos'd She had not been in her own walls enclosed, But rapt by wonder to some foreign state, Seeing all her issue so disconsolate, And all her peaceful mansions possess'd With war's just spoil, and many a foreign guest From every corner driving an enjoyer, Supplying it with power of a destroyer. So far'd fair Hero in th' expugned fort Of her chaste bosom; and of every sort Strange thoughts possess'd her, ransacking her breast For that that was not there, her wonted rest. She was a mother straight, and bore with pain Thoughts that spake straight, and wish'd their mother slain; She hates their lives, and they their own and hers: Such strife still grows where sin the race prefers: Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams, That waking breaks, and fills us with extremes. She mus'd how she could look upon her sire, And not show that without, that was intire; For as a glass is an inanimate eye, And outward forms embraceth inwardly, So is the eye an animate glass, that shows In forms without us; and as Phoebus throws His beams abroad, though he in clouds be clos'd, Still glancing by them till he find oppos'd A loose and rorid vapour that is fit T' event his searching beams, and useth it To form a tender twenty-colour'd eye, Cast in a circle round about the sky; So when our fiery soul, our body's star, (That ever is in motion circular,) Conceives a form, in seeking to display it Through all our cloudy parts, it doth convey it Forth at the eye, as the most pregnant place, And that reflects it round about the face. And this event, uncourtly Hero thought, Her inward guilt would in her looks have wrought; For yet the world's stale cunning she resisted, To bear foul thoughts, yet forge what looks she listed, And held it for a very silly sleight, To make a perfect metal counterfeit. Glad to disclaim herself, proud of an art That makes the face a pandar to the heart. Those be the painted moons, whose lights profane Beauty's true heaven, at full still in their wane; Those be the lapwing faces that still cry, "Here 'tis!" when that they vow is nothing nigh: