Now since you bear a date so short, Live double for 't. 20 How can thy fortress ever stand If 't be not manned? The siege so gains upon the place Thou'lt find the trenches in thy face. Pity thyself then if not me, And hold not out, lest like Ostend thou be Nothing but rubbish at delivery. The candidates of Peter's chair Must plead grey hair, And use the simony of a cough 30 To help them off. But when I woo, thus old and spent, I'll wed by will and testament. No, let us love while crisped and curled; The greatest honours, on the agéd hurled, Are but gay furloughs for another world. To-morrow what thou tenderest me Is legacy. Not one of all those ravenous hours But thee devours. 40 And though thou still recruited be, Like Pelops, with soft ivory, Though thou consume but to renew, Yet Love as lord doth claim a heriot due; That 's the best quick thing I can find of you. I feel thou art consenting ripe By that soft gripe, And those regealing crystal spheres. I hold thy tears Pledges of more distilling sweets, 50 The bath that ushers in the sheets. Else pious Julia, angel-wise, Moves the Bethesda of her trickling eyes To cure the spital world of maladies. [_To Julia, &c._ Johnson singled out the opening verse of this as a special example of 'bringing remote ideas together'.] [Line: 1 'Shrieve' of course = 'Sheriff'.] [Lines: 3-4 'advowson' (again of course, but these things get curiously mistaken nowadays) = '_right_ of presenting to or enjoying a benefice'. 'Incumbency' = 'the actual _occupation_ or enjoyment'. Cf. _Square-Cap_, ll. 37-8.] [Line: 9 rebated] The opposite of '_un_bated' in _Hamlet_--with the button _on_.] [Line: 11 Mr. Pepys on November 6, 1660, watched this process (which was specially used in ship-selling) for the first time and with interest. 'candle' _1653_: 'candle's' _1677_.] [Lines: 17-18 Not a very happy 'conceiting' of the fact that in a millennium and a half the Julian reckoning had got ten days behindhand.] [Line: 27 The siege of Ostend (1601-4) lasted three years and seventy-seven days.] [Line: 34 Did a far greater Cambridge poet think of this in writing 'When the locks are crisp and curl'd?' (_The Vision of Sin._)] [Line: 48 regealing] Cleveland seems to use this unusual word in the sense of '_un_freezing'.] [Line: 51 _1677_ spoils sense and verse alike by beginning the line with 'Than'. The 'tears' _are_ the 'bath'.] Poems in 1677 but not in 1653. Upon Princess Elizabeth, born the night before New Year's Day.