Emblems With elegant figures :: :: University of Virginia Library

Should'st thou not (Lord!) dispence.
Thy powerfull influence,
We all should freez
Like Scythian seas
Bound up in flinty ice, and all
The suns kind warmth in vain should fall:
Nor would dame Nature let her riches come
out of her womb:
But since thou let'st thy rays run free,
And spirit gives
To all that lives
Each severall thing continues, but by thee.

2

Thus art thou sweetly hurl'd
Even through the little world,
But once bereave
What first thou gave
What a lean dulnesse soon doth thwart
The dead and putryfying heart?
No high affections then advance the soul
and make it roul
About the woolly clouds to play,
And censure all
That's here, as small
As the least Atome that sports in a ray.

3

Then is mortality
A most enforcing lie
And clay is grown,
As hard as stone
Nor can our cunning make it loose
Till that thy heat do interpose,
Thus do our wounds corrupt and gaping stand
Till that thine hand
Do gently close and pull these darts
Which so have bin
By the sent in
To our insensate and obdurate hearts.

Epigram 4.

What art thou sick to death, go and reside
In yon red Hospitall that stands so wide:
'Las tis a wound, what though, by it thou'lt be
Healed of whatsoever infirmity.