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The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits! |
But that your trespass now becomes a fee, |
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me. |
121 |
'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, |
When not to be, receives reproach of being, |
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, |
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing. |
For why should others' false adulterate eyes |
Give salutation to my sportive blood? |
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, |
Which in their wills count bad what I think good? |
No, I am that I am, and they that level |
At my abuses, reckon up their own, |
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel; |
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown |
Unless this general evil they maintain, |
All men are bad and in their badness reign. |
122 |
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain |
Full charactered with lasting memory, |
Which shall above that idle rank remain |
Beyond all date even to eternity. |
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart |
Have faculty by nature to subsist, |
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part |
Of thee, thy record never can be missed: |
That poor retention could not so much hold, |
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score, |
Therefore to give them from me was I bold, |
To trust those tables that receive thee more: |
To keep an adjunct to remember thee |
Were to import forgetfulness in me. |
123 |
No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change, |
Thy pyramids built up with newer might |
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange, |
They are but dressings Of a former sight: |
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire, |
What thou dost foist upon us that is old, |
And rather make them born to our desire, |
Than think that we before have heard them told: |
Thy registers and thee I both defy, |
Not wond'ring at the present, nor the past, |
For thy records, and what we see doth lie, |
Made more or less by thy continual haste: |
This I do vow and this shall ever be, |
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee. |
124 |
If my dear love were but the child of state, |
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered, |
As subject to time's love or to time's hate, |
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered. |
No it was builded far from accident, |
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls |
Under the blow of thralled discontent, |
Whereto th' inviting time our fashion calls: |
It fears not policy that heretic, |
Which works on leases of short-numbered hours, |
But all alone stands hugely politic, |
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers. |
To this I witness call the fools of time, |
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime. |
125 |
Were't aught to me I bore the canopy, |
With my extern the outward honouring, |
Or laid great bases for eternity, |
Which proves more short than waste or ruining? |
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour |
Lose all, and more by paying too much rent |
For compound sweet; forgoing simple savour, |
Pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent? |
No, let me be obsequious in thy heart, |
And take thou my oblation, poor but free, |
Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art, |
But mutual render, only me for thee. |
Hence, thou suborned informer, a true soul |
When most impeached, stands least in thy control. |
126 |
O thou my lovely boy who in thy power, |
Dost hold Time's fickle glass his fickle hour: |
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st, |
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow'st. |
If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack) |
As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, |
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill |
May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill. |
Yet fear her O thou minion of her pleasure, |
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure! |
Her audit (though delayed) answered must be, |
And her quietus is to render thee. |
127 |
In the old age black was not counted fair, |
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name: |
But now is black beauty's successive heir, |
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame, |
For since each hand hath put on nature's power, |
Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face, |
Sweet beauty hath no name no holy bower, |
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace. |
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