Lovelace is dead! then let the world return To its first chaos, mufled in its urn; The stars and elements together lye, Drench'd in perpetual obscurity, And the whole machine in confusion be, As immethodick as an anarchie. May the great eye of day weep out his light, Pale Cynthia leave the regiment of night, The galaxia, all in sables dight, Send forth no corruscations to our sight, The Sister-Graces and the sacred Nine, Statu'd with grief, attend upon his shrine, Whose worth, whose loss, should we but truly rate, 'Twould puzzle our arithmetic to state Th' accompt of vertu's so transcendent high, Number and value reach infinity. Did I pronounce him dead! no, no! he lives, And from his aromatique cell he gives Spice-breathed fumes, whose odoriferous scent (In zephre-gales which never can be spent) Doth spread it self abroad, and much out-vies The eastern bird in her self-sacrifice; Or Father Phoebus, who to th' world derives Such various and such multiformed lives, Took notice that brave Lovelace did inspire The universe with his Promethean fire, And snatcht him hence, before his thread was spun, En'ving that here should be another Sun. T. L.<113.1> <113.1> Thomas Lovelace, one of the poet's brothers. ON THE DEATH OF MY DEAR BROTHER. EPITAPH. Tread (reader) gently, gently ore The happy dust beneath this floor: For in this narrow vault is set An alablaster cabinet, Wherein both arts and arms were put, Like Homers Iliads in a nut, Till Death with slow and easie pace Snatcht the bright jewell from the case; And now, transform'd, he doth arise A constellation in the skies, Teaching the blinded world the way, Through night, to startle into day: And shipwrackt shades, with steady hand, He steers unto th' Elizian land. Dudley Posthumus-Lovelace. THE END. Comments on the preparation of the E-Text: ANGLE BRACKETS: Any place where angle brackets are used, i.e. < >, it is a change made during the preparation of this E-Text. The original printed book did not use this character at all. SQUARE BRACKETS: The square brackets, i.e. [ ] are copied from the printed book, without change. FOOTNOTES: For this E-Text version of the book, the footnotes have been consolidated at the end of each section of the introduction, and at the end of each poem. Numbering of the footnotes has been changed, and each footnote is given a unique identity in the form <XX.YY>, where XX is a poem or a section of the introduction, and YY is the number of the note within that poem or section. Some footnote markers are missing. I have inserted markers where I believe they should go. All such markers are identified by double brackets. e.g. <<9.2>>