If winter come and greeness then do fade,
A Spring returns, and they more youthfull made;
But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.
By birth more noble then those creatures all,
Yet seems by nature and by custome curs'd,
No sooner born, but grief and care makes fall,
That state obliterate he had at first:
Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again,
Nor habitations long their names retain,
But in oblivion to the final day remain.
Shall I then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth,
Because their beauty and their strength last longer
Shall I wish there, or never to have had birth,
Because they're bigger & their bodyes stronger?
Nay, they shall darken, perish, fade and dye,
And when unmade, so ever shall they lye,
But man was made for endless immortality.
Here at last she is released from the didactic. She can look at the sun without feeling it necessary to particularize her knowledge of its
" . . . swift Annual and diurnal Course,
Thy daily streight and yearly oblique path."
Imagination has been weighted by the innumerable details, more and more essential to the Puritan mind, but now she draws one long free breath, and rises far beyond the petty limit of her usual thought, the italicised lines in what follows holding a music one may seek for in vain in any other verse of the period:
Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm,
Close sate I by a goodly Rivers side,
Where gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm;
A lonely place with pleasures dignifi'd,
