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Yet love and hate me too,

Love me,

So these extremes shall ne'er their office do;
that I may die the gentler way;
Hate me, because thy love's too great for me:
Or let these two themselves, not me decay;
So shall I live thy stage, not triumph be:
Then lest thy love thou hate and me undo,
O let me live, yet love and hate me too!

THE EXPIRATION.

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So, go break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away.
Turn thou, Ghost! that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day;

As ask none leave to love; nor will we owe
Any so cheap a death as saying, Go.

Go; and if that word have not quite kill'd thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too:
Or if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murd'rer do:
Except it be too late to kill me so,

Being double dead, going, and bidding Go.

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THE COMPUTATION.

FROM
ROM my first twenty years, since yesterday,
I scarce believ'd thou couldst be gone away;

For forty more I fed on favours past,

And forty' on hopes that thou would'st they might last.
Tears drown'd one hundred and sighs blew out two;
A thousand I did neither think nor do,

Or not divide, all being one thought of you;

Or in a thousand more forgot that too.

Yet call not this long life; but think that I

Am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die? 10 THE PARADOX.

No lover saith I love, nor any other

Can judge a perfect lover;

He thinks that else none can or will agree

That any loves but he.

I cannot say I lov'd, for who can say

He was kill'd yesterday?

Love with excess of heat more young than old;
Death kills with too much cold.

We die but once, and who lov'd last did die;

He that saith twice doth lie:

For tho' he seem to move, and stir a while,

It doth the sense beguile.

Such life is like the light, which bideth yet,
When the life's light is set;

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Or like the heat which fire in solid matter
Leaves behind two hours after.

Once I lov'd and dy'd, and am now become
Mine epitaph and tomb.

Here dead men speak their last, and so do I;
Love-slain, lo! here I die.

SONG.

SOUL's joy, now I am gone,

And you alone,

(Which cannot be,

Since I must leave myself with thee,

And carry thee with me)

Yet when unto our eyes.
Absence denies

Each other's sight,

And makes to us a constant night,

When others change to light;

"O give no way to grief,

"But let belief

"Of mutual love

"This wonder to the vulgar prove,

"Our bodies, not we, move."'

Let not thy wit beweep

Words, but sense deep;

For when we miss,

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By distance, our hopes-joining bliss,
Ev'n then our souls shall kiss:

Fools have no means to meet

But by their feet:

Why should our clay

Over our spirits so much sway,

To tie us to that way?

"O give no way to grief," &c.

FAREWELL TO LOVE.

WHILST yet to prove

I thought there was some deity in love,

So did I reverence, and gave

Worship, as Atheists at their dying hour

Call what they cannot name an unknown power;
As ignorantly did I crave.

Thus when

Things, not yet known, are coveted by men,

Our desires give them fashion, and so

As they wax lesser fall, as they size grow.

But from late fair

His Highness (sitting in a golden chair)
Is not less cared for after three days

By children, than the thing which lovers so
Blindly admire, and with such worship woo:
Being had, enjoying it decays;

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And thence

What before pleas'd them all takes but one sense,
And that so lamely, as it leaves behind

A kind of sorrowing dulness to the mind.

Ah! cannot we,

As well as cocks and lions, jocund be
After such pleasures? unless wise
Nature decreed (since each act, they say,
Diminisheth the length of life a day)
This, as she would man should despise
The sport,

Because that other curse of being short,
And only for a minute made to be

Eager, desires to raise posterity.

Since 90, my mind

Shall not desire what no man else can find:
I'll no more dote and run

To pursue things which had endamag'd me;
And when I come where moving beauties be,
As men do when the summer sun

Grows great,

Tho' I admire their greatness, shun their heat;
Each place can afford shadows. If all fail,

'Tis but applying worm-seed to the tail.

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