Deare friend, be silent and with patience see,What this mad times Catastrophe will be;The worlds first Wisemen certainly mistookThemselves, and spoke things quite beside the book,And that which they have of said of God, untrue,Or else expect strange judgement to ensue.This Isle is a mere Bedlam, and therein,We all lie raving, mad in every sinn,And […]

Must I needs write, who’s he that can refuse,He wants a mind, for her that hath no Muse,The thought of her doth heav’nly rage inspire,Next powerful, to those cloven tongues of fire.Since I knew aught, time never did allowMe stuff fit for an Elegy, till now;When France and England’s HENRIES dy’d, my quill,Why, I know […]

Light Sonnets hence, and to loose Lovers fly,And mournful Maidens sing an ElegieOn those three SHEFFIELDS, over-whelm’d with waves,Whose loss the tears of all the Muses craves;A thing so full of pitty as this was,Me thinks for nothing should not slightly pass.Treble this loss was, why should it not borrow,Through this Isle’s treble parts, a […]

Madam, to shew the smoothness of my vain,Neither that I would have you entertainThe time in reading me, which you would spendIn fair discourse with some known honest friend,I write not to you. Nay, and which is more,My powerful verses strive not to restore,What time and sickness have in you impair’d,To other ends my Elegy […]

My dearly loved friend how oft have we,In winter evenings (meaning to be free,)To some well-chosen place used to retire;And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire,Have past the hours contentedly with chat,Now talk of this, and then discours’d of that,Spoke our own verses ‘twixt ourselves, if notOther mens lines, which we by chance […]

I many a time have greatly marvell’d, why Men say, their friends depart when as they die, How well that word, a dying, doth express, I did not know (I freely must confess,) Till her departure: for whose missed sight, I am enforc’d this Elegy to write: But since resistless fate will have it so, […]

Read here (sweet Mayd) the story of my woe, The dreary abstracts of my endless cares, With my lives sorrow interlined so; Smok’d with my sighs, and blotted with my tears: The sad memorials of my miseries, Pend in the grief of mine afflicted ghost; My life’s complaint in doleful Elegies, With so pure love […]