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

Even as the wandring Traveller doth stray
Lead from his way
By a false fire, whose flame to cheated sight
doth lead aright,
All Paths are footed over but that one
Which should be gone:
Even so my foolish wishes are in chase
Of every thing but what they should embrace.

2

We laugh at children that can when they please
A bubble raise,
And when their fond Ambition sated is
Again dismisse
Thee fleeting Toy into its former aire:
What do we here
But act such tricks? yet thus we differ, they
Destroy, so do not we: we sweat, they play.

3

Ambitious towring's do some gallants keep
From calmer sleep,
Yet when these thoughts the most possessed are
They grope but aire,
And when they're highest in an instant fade
Into a shade;
Or like a stone that more forc't upwards shall
With greater violence to its centre fall.

4

Another, whose conceptions onely dream
Monsters of fame.
The vain applause of other mad-men buyes
With his own sighes
Yet his enlarged Name shall never craul
Over this ball:
But soon consume, thus doth a trumpet's sound
Rush bravely on a little, then's not found.

5

But we as soon may tell how often shapes
Are chang'd by apes;
As know how oft mans childish thoughts do vary
And still miscarry:
So a weak eye in twilight thinks it sees
New species,
While it sees nought, so men in dreams conceive
Of scepters, till that waking undeceive.

Epigram 2.

Why frets thou that thy soul doth dote upon
These guilded trifles of corruption?
Thy self's the very cause, what remedy
And thine own hearts a Traytor to thine eye.