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Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,

And issuing from the sheet this body seen,

He would have justly thought this body a soul,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.

SER

Desunt cætera.

TO SIR ROBERT CARR.

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I presume you rather try what you can do in me, than what I can do in verse: you know my uttermost when it was best, and even then I did best when I bad least truth for my subjects. In this present case 'here is so much truth as it defeats all poetry: call, therefore, this paper by what name you will, and if it be not worthy of him, nor of you, nor of me, smother it, and be that the sacrifice. If you bad commanded me to have waited on his body to Scotland, and preached there, I would bave embraced the obligation with more alacrity; but I thank you that you will command me "that which I was loth to do, for even that bath given a tincture of merit to the obedience of

Your poor friend and servant in Christ Jesus,

AN HYMN

3. DONNE.

TO THE SAINTS, AND TO MARQUIS HAMILTON.

WHETHER that soul, which now comes up to you, Fill any former rank, or make a new;

Whether it take a name nam'd there before,
Or be a name itself, and order more

Than was in heav'n till now; (for may not he
Be so, if every several angel be

A kind alone) whatever order grow

Greater by him in heav'n, we do not so.
One of your orders grows by his access,
But by his loss grow all our orders less.
The name of Father, Master, Friend, the name
Of Subject and of Prince, in one is lame;
Fair mirth is damp'd, and conversation black,
The Household widow'd, and the Garter slack;
The Chapel wants an ear, Council a tongue;
Story, a theme, and Music lacks a song.
Blest order! that hath him; the loss of him
Gangren'd all orders here; all lost a limb!
Never made body such haste to confess
What a soul was; all former comeliness
Fled in a minute, when the soul was gone,
And having lost that beauty would have none:
So fell our monasteries, in an instant grown
Not to less houses, but to heaps of stone;
So sent his body, that fair form it wore,
Unto the sphere of forms, and doth (before
His soul shall fill up his sepulchral stone)
Anticipate a resurrection:

For as it is his fame, now his soul's here,
So in the form thereof his body's there.

ΤΟ

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And if, fair soul! not with first innocents
Thy station be, but with the penitents,
(And who shall dare to ask then, when I am
Dy'd scarlet in the blood of that pure Lamb,
Whether that colour which is scarlet then

Were black or white before in eyes of men?)
When thou rememb'rest what sins thou didst find
Amongst those many friends now left behind,
And seest such sinners, as they are, with thee
Got thither by repentance, let it be

Thy wish to wish all there, to wish them clean;
Wish him a David, her a Magdalen.

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THE

ANNUNCIATION AND PASSION.

TAMELY, frail flesh! abstain to-day; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away;
She sees him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur: this doubtful day:
Of feast or fast Christ came and went away.
She sees him nothing twice at once, who 's all;
She sees a cedar plant itself, and fall;
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life, at once, not yet alive, and dead:
She sees at once the virgin-mother stay..
Reclus'd at home, public at Golgotha.

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Sad and rejoic'd she 's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen :
At once a son is promis'd her, and gone;
Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John:
Not fully a mother, she 's in orbity,

At once receiver and the legacy.

All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th' abridgment of Christ's story, which makes one
(As in plain maps the furthest west is east)
Of th' angel's Ave and Consummatum est.

How well the church, God's Court of Faculties,
Deals in sometimes and seldom joining these!
As by the self-fix'd pole we never do

Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shews where th' other is, and which we say
(Because it strays not far) doth never stray:
So God by his church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go;

His spirit, as his fiery pillar, doth

Lead, and his church as cloud; to one end both.

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This church, by letting those feasts join, hath shown Death and conception in mankind are one,

Or 'twas in him the same humility,

That he would be a man and leave to be,
Or as creation he hath made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period;
His imitating spouse would join in one

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Manhood's extremes; he shall come, he is gone; 40

Or as tho' one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have serv'd, he yet shed all :
So tho' the least of his pains, deeds or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then in gross, my soul! up-lay,
And in my life retail it every day.

GOOD-FRIDAY, 1613.

RIDING WESTWARD.

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LET man's soul be a sphere, and then in this
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey:
Pleasure or business so our souls admit

For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is 't that I am carried t'wards the west

This day, when my soul's form bends to the east; tb

There I should see a sun by rising set,

And by that setting endless day beget.

But that Christ on his cross did rise and fall,

Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad I do not see

That spectacle of too much weight for me.

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