When your fair hand receives this little book
You must not there for prose or verses look.
Those empty regions which within you see,
May by yourself planted and peopled be:
And though we scarce allow your sex to prove
Writers (unless the argument be Love);
Yet without crime or envy you have room
Here, both the scribe and author to become.
[_Upon a Table-Book, &c._] The title in one of
Hannah's MS. copies has '_Noble_ Lady'. The person addressed
does not seem to have been identified.]
_To the same Lady upon Mr. Burton's Melancholy._
If in this Glass of Humours you do find
The passions or diseases of your mind,
Here without pain, you safely may endure,
Though not to suffer, yet to read your cure.
But if you nothing meet you can apply,
Then, ere you need, you have a remedy.
And I do wish you never may have cause
To be adjudg'd by these fantastic laws;
But that this book's example may be known,
By others' Melancholy, not your own. 10
[Line: 6 _MS._ '_before_ you need'--perhaps better. The lady
to whom the _Anatomy_ was likely to be congenial must have
been worth knowing.]
_The Farewell._
_Splendidis longùm valedico nugis._
Farewell, fond Love, under whose childish whip,
I have serv'd out a weary prenti'ship;
Thou that hast made me thy scorn'd property,
To doat on rocks, but yielding loves to fly:
Go, bane of my dear quiet and content,
Now practise on some other patient.
Farewell, false Hope, that fann'd my warm desire
Till it had rais'd a wild unruly fire,
Which nor sighs cool, nor tears extinguish can,
Although my eyes out-flow'd the Ocean: 10
Forth of my thoughts for ever, Thing of Air,
Begun in error, finish'd in despair.
Farewell, vain World, upon whose restless stage
'Twixt Love and Hope I have fool'd out my age;
Henceforth, ere sue to thee for my redress,
I'll woo the wind, or court the wilderness;
And buried from the day's discovery,
Study a slow yet certain way to die.
My woful monument shall be a cell,
The murmur of the purling brook my knell; 20
My lasting epitaph the rock shall groan:
Thus when sad lovers ask the weeping stone,
What wretched thing does in that centre lie?
The hollow Echo will reply, 'twas I.
[_The Farewell._] The following are the variants of
Malone MS. 22:
Lines: 4-6
To doat on those that lov'd not and to fly
Love that woo'd me. Go, bane of my content,
And practise ...
]
[Line: 21
And for an epitaph the rock shall groan
Eternally: if any ask the stone.
]
[Line: 23 centre] compass.]
_A Blackmoor Maid wooing a fair Boy: sent to the Author by
Mr. Hen. Rainolds._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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