No More Learning

Under the discipline severe

Of Fairfax, and the starry Verb,

Where not one object can come nigh tsb

But pure, and spotless as the eye.

And goodness doth itself entail

On females, if there want a male.



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32 THE POEMS

Go now, fond sex, that on your face
Do all your useless study place.
Nor once at vice your brows dare knit.
Lest the smooth forehead wrinkled sit :
Yet your own face shall at you grin.
Thorough the black bag of your skin.
When knowledge only could have filled,
And virtue all those furrows tilled.
Hence she with graces more divine
Supplies beyond her sex the line,
And, like a sprig of misletoe.
On the Fairfacian oak does grow.
Whence, for some universal good,
The priest shall cut the sacred bud.
While her glad parents most rejoice
And make their destiny their choice.
Meantime, ye fields, springs, bushes, flowers.
Where yet she leads her studious houi-s,
(Till Fate her worthily translates
And find a Fairfax for our Thwates,)
Employ the means you have by her.
And in your kind yourselves prefer.
That, as all virgins she precedes,
So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads.
For you, Thessalian Tempe's seat
Shall now be scorned as obsolete ;
Aranjuez, as less, disdained ;
The Bel-Retiro, as constrained ;
But name not the Idalian grove.
For 'twas the seat of wanton love ;



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OF MARVELL. 33



Nor e'en the dead's Eljsian fields,
Yet not to them your beauty yields.
Tis not, as once appeared the world,
A heap confused together hurled,
All negligently overgrown,
Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone ;
Your lesser world contains the same.
But in more decent order tame.
You, Heaven's centre, Nature's lap ;
And Paradise's only map.

And now the salmon-fishers moist,
Their leathern boats begin to hoist ;
And, like Antipodes in shoes.
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow.
These rational amphibii go !
Let's in ; for the dark hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.



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34 THK POEMS



THE CORONET.

When with the thorns with which I long, too
long,
With many a piercing wound,
My Saviour's head have crowned,

I seek with garlands to redress that wrong, —
Through every garden, every mead,

I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers)
Dismantling all the fragrant towers

That once adorned my shepherdess's head :

And now, when I have summed up all my store.
Thinking (so I myself deceive)
So rich a chaplet thence- to weave

As never yet the King of Glory wore,
Alas ! I And the Serpent old,
Twining in his speckled breast.
About the flowers disguised does fold,
With wreaths of fame and interest.