Such men as sideling ride the ambling Muse, Whose saddle is as frequent as the stews. Whose raptures are in ev’ry pageant seen, In ev’ry wassail-rhyme and dancing-green; When he that writes by any beam of truth Must dive as deep as he, past shallow youth. Truth dwells in gulfs, whose deeps hide shades so rich That Night sits muffled there in clouds of pitch, More dark than Nature made her, and requires, To clear her tough mists, heav’n’s great fire of fires, To whom the sun itself is but a beam. For sick souls then—but rapt in foolish dream— To wrastle with these heav’n-strong mysteries, What madness is it? when their light serves eyes That are not worldly in their least aspect, But truly pure, and aim at heav’n direct. Yet these none like but what the brazen head Blatters abroad, no sooner born but dead. Holding, then, in eternal contempt, my Lord, those short-lived bubbles, eternize your virtue and judgment with the Grecian monarch; esteeming, not as the least of your new-year’s presents, Homer, three thousand years dead, now reviv’d, Ev’n from that dull death that in life he liv’d; When none conceited him, none understood That so much life in so much death as blood Conveys about it could mix. But when death Drunk up the bloody mist that human breath Pour’d round about him—poverty and spite. Thick’ning the hapless vapour—then truth’s light Glimmer’d about his poem; the pinch’d soul (Amidst the mysteries it did enrol) Brake pow’rfully abroad. And as we see The sun all-hid in clouds, at length got free, Through some forc’d covert, over all the ways, Near and beneath him, shoots his vented rays Far off, and sticks them in some little glade, All woods, fields, rivers, left besides in shade; So your Apollo, from that world of light Clos’d in his poem’s body, shot to sight Some few forc’d beams, which near him were not seen, (As in his life or country) Fate and spleen Clouding their radiance; which when Death had clear’d, To far-off regions his free beams appear’d; In which all stood and wonder’d, striving which His birth and rapture should in right enrich. Twelve labours of your Thespian Hercules I now present your Lordship; do but please To lend life means till th’ other twelve receive Equal achievement; and let Death then reave My life now lost in our patrician loves, That knock heads with the herd; in whom there moves One blood, one soul, both drown’d in one set height Of stupid envy and mere popular spite. Whose loves with no good did my least vein fill; And from their hates I fear as little ill. Their bounties nourish not when most they feed, But, where there is no merit or no need, Rain into rivers still, and are such show’rs As bubbles spring and overflow the flow’rs. Their worse parts and worst men their best suborns, Like winter cows whose milk runs to their horns. And as litigious clients’ books of law Cost infinitely; taste of all the awe Bench’d in our kingdom’s policy, piety, state; Earn all their deep explorings; satiate