If happiness may harbour in content,
If life in love, if love in better life,
Then unto many happiness is lent,
And long-departed joy might then be rife:
Some happy if they live, some if they die,
Happy in life, happy in tragedy.
Content is happiness because content;
Bareness and barrenness is virtue’s grace,
Bare because wealth to poverty is bent,
Barren in that it scorns ill-fortune’s place;
The barren earth is barren of her tares,
The barren woman barren of her cares.
The soul of virtue is eternity,
All-filling essence of divinest rage;
And virtue’s true eternal memory
Is barrenness, her soul’s eternal gage:
O happy soul, that is engaged there,
And pawns his life that barren badge to wear!
See how the multitude, with humble hearts,
Lies prostrate for to welcome her return!
See how they mourn and wail when she departs!
See how they make their tears her trophy’s urn!
Being present, they desire her; being gone,
Their hot desire is turn’d to hotter moan.
As every one hath not one nature’s mould,
So every one hath not one nature’s mind;
Some think that dross which others take for gold,
Each difference cometh from a differing kind;
Some do despise what others do embrace,
Some praise the thing which others do disgrace.
The barren doth embrace their barrenness,
And hold it as a virtue-worthy meed;
The other calls conception happiness,
And hold it as a virtue-worthy deed;
The one is firmly grounded on a rock,
The other billows’ game and tempests’ mock.
Sometime the nettle groweth with the rose;
The nettle hath a sting, the rose a thorn;
This stings the hand, the other pricks the nose,
Harming that scent which her sweet birth had borne;
Weeds among herbs, herbs among weeds are found,
Tares in the mantle of a corny ground.
The nettle’s growth is fast, the rose’s slow,
The weeds outgrow the herbs, the tares the corn;
These may be well compar’d to vice’s show,
Which covets for to grow ere it be born:
As greatest danger doth pursue fast going,
So greatest danger doth ensue fast growing.
The tallest cedar hath the greatest wind,
The highest tree is subject unto falls;
High-soaring eagles soon are strucken blind;
The tongue must needs be hoarse with many calls:
The wicked, thinking for to touch the sky,
Are blasted with the fire of heaven’s eye.
So like ascending and descending air,
Both dusky vapours from two humorous clouds,
Lies withered the glory of their fair;
Unpleasant branches wrench’d in folly’s floods;
Unprofitable fruits, like to a weed,
Made only to infect, and not to feed.
Made for to make a fast, and not a feast,
Made rather for infection than for meat,
Not worthy to be eaten of a beast,
Thy taste so sour, thy poison is so great;
Thou may’st be well compared to a tree,
Because thy branches are as ill as thee.
Thou hast begot thine own confusion,
The witnesses of what thou dost begin,
Thy doomers in thy life’s conclusion,
Which will, unask’d and ask’d, reveal thy sin:
Needs must the new-hatch’d birds bewray the nest,
When they are nursed in a step-dame’s breast.
But righteousness is of another sex,
Her root is from an everlasting seed,
No weak, unable grounding doth connex
Her never-limited memorial’s deed;
She hath no branches for a tempest’s prey,
No deeds but scorns to yield unto decay.
She hath no wither’d fruit, no show of store,
But perfect essence of a complete power;
Say that she dies to world, she lives the more,
As who so righteous but doth wait death’s hour?
Who knows not death to be the way to rest?
And he that never dies is never blest.
Happy is he that lives, twice he that dies,
Thrice happy he which neither liv’d nor died,
Which never saw the earth with mortal eyes,
Which never knew what miseries are tried:
Happy is life, twice happy is our death,
But three times thrice he which had never breath.
Some thinks that pleasure is achiev’d by years,
Or by maintaining of a wretched life,
When, out, alas! it heapeth tears on tears,
Grief upon grief, strife on beginning strife:
Pleasure is weak, if measured by length;
The oldest ages hath the weaker strength.
Three turnings are contain’d in mortal course,
Old, mean, and young; mean and old brings age;
The youth hath strength, the mean decaying force,
The old are weak, yet strong in anger’s rage:
Three turnings in one age, strong, weak, and weaker,
Yet age nor youth is youth’s or age’s breaker.
Some says that youth is quick in judging causes,
Some says that age is witty, grave, and wise:
I hold of age’s side, with their applauses,
Which judges with their hearts, not with their eyes;
I say grave wisdom lies in grayest heads,
And undefiled lives in age’s beds.
God is both grave and old, yet young and new,
Grave because aged, aged because young;
Long youth may well be called age’s hue,
And hath no differing sound upon the tongue:
God old, because eternities are old;
Young, for eternities one motion hold.
Some in their birth, some dies when they are born,
Some born, and some abortive, yet all die;
Some in their youth, some in old age forlorn,
Some neither young nor old, but equally:
The righteous, when he liveth with the sinner,
Doth hope for death, his better life’s beginner.
The swine delights to wallow in the mire,
The giddy drunkard in excess of wine;
He may corrupt the purest reason’s gyre,
And she turn virtue into vice’s sign:
Mischief is mire, and may infect that spring
Which every flow and ebb of vice doth bring.
Fishes are oft deceived by the bait,
The bait deceiving fish doth fish deceive;
So righteous are allur’d by sin’s deceit,
And oft enticed into sinners’ weave:
The righteous be as fishes to their gin,
Beguil’d, deceiv’d, allured into sin.
The fisher hath a bait deceiving fish,
The fowler hath a net deceiving fowls;
Both wisheth to obtain their snaring wish,
Observing time, like night-observing owls;
The fisher lays his bait, fowler his net,
He hopes for fish, the other birds to get.
This fisher is the wicked, vice his bait,
This fowler is the sinner, sin his net;
The simple righteous falls in their deceit,
And like a prey, a fish, a fowl beset:
A bait, a net, obscuring what is good,
Like fish and fowl took up for vice’s food.
But baits nor nets, gins nor beguiling snares,
Vice nor the vicious sinner, nor the sin,
Can shut the righteous into prison’s cares,
Or set deceiving baits to mew them in;
They know their life’s deliverer, heaven’s God,
Can break their baits and snares with justice’ rod.
When vice abounds on earth, and earth in vice,
When virtue keeps her chamber in the sky,
To shun the mischief which her baits entice,
Her snares, her nets, her guiles, her company;
As soon as mischief reigns upon the earth,
Heaven calls the righteous to a better birth.
The blinded eyes can never see the way,
The blinded heart can never see to see,
The blinded soul doth always go astray;
All three want sight, in being blind all three:
Blind and yet see, they see and yet are blind,
The face hath eyes, but eyeless is the mind.
They see with outward sight God’s heavenly grace,
His grace, his love, his mercy on his saints;
With outward-faced eye and eyed face,
Their outward body inward soul depaints:
Of heart’s chief eye they chiefly are bereft,
And yet the shadow of two eyes are left.
Some blinded be in face, and some in soul:
The face’s eyes are not incurable;
The other wanteth healing to be whole,
Or seems to some to be endurable;
Look in a blinded eye, bright is the glass,
Though brightness banished from what it was.
So, quoth the righteous, are these blinded hearts;
The outward glass is clear, the substance dark,
Both seem as if one took the other’s parts,
Yet both in one have not one brightness’ spark:
The outward eye is but destruction’s reader,
Wanting the inward eye to be the leader.
Our body may be call’d a commonweal,
Our head the chief, for reason harbours there,
From thence comes heart’s and soul’s united zeal;
All else inferiors be, which stand in fear:
This commonweal, rul’d by discretion’s eye,
Lives likewise if she live, dies if she die.
Then how can weal or wealth, common or proper,
Long stand, long flow, long flourish, long remain,
When wail is weal’s, and stealth is wealth’s chief stopper,
When sight is gone, which never comes again?
The wicked sees the righteous lose their breath,
But know not what reward they gain by death.
Though blind in sight, yet can they see to harm,
See to despise, see to deride and mock;
But their revenge lies in God’s mighty arm,
Scorning to choose them for his chosen flock:
He is the shepherd, godly are his sheep,
They wake in joy, these in destruction sleep.
The godly sleep in eyes, but wake in hearts;
The wicked sleep in hearts, but wake in eyes:
These ever wake, eyes are no sleepy parts;
These ever sleep, for sleep is heart’s disguise:
Their waking eyes do see their heart’s lament,
While heart securely sleeps in eyes’ content.
If they awake, sleep’s image doth molest them,
And beats into their waking memories;
If they do sleep, joy waking doth detest them,
Yet beats into their sleeping arteries:
Sleeping or waking, they have fear on fear,
Waking or sleeping, they are ne’er the near.
If waking, they remember what they are,
What sins they have committed in their waking;
If sleeping, they forget tormenting’s fare,
How ready they have been in mischief’s making:
When they awake, their wickedness betrays them;
When they do sleep, destruction dismays them.