Maide will ye loue me yea or no? tell me the trothe and let me go. It can be no lesse than a sinful deed, trust me truly, To linger a Louer that lookes to speede, in due time duly. You maides that thinke yourselves as fine, as Venus and all the Muses nine: The Father Himselfe when He first made man, trust me truly, Made you for his helpe when the world began, in due time duly. Then sith God's will was even so why should you disdaine your Louer tho? But rather with a willing heart, loue him truly; For in so doing you do your part let reason rule ye. The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7] A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown[8]:-- In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity: The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any Writh'd not at passed joy? The feel of _not_ to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme.[9] Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's _Spanish Fryar_, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:--