If being near the fire I burned with it, Now that its flame is quenched and doth not show, What wonder if I waste within and glow, Dwindling away to cinders bit by bit? ...
That thy great beauty on our earth may be Shrined in a lady softer and more kind, I call on nature to collect and bind All those delights the slow years steal from thee,...
A heart of flaming sulphur, flesh of tow, Bones of dry wood, a soul without a guide To curb the fiery will, the ruffling pride Of fierce desires that from the passions flow;...
When divine Art conceives a form and face, She bids the craftsman for his first essay To shape a simple model in mere clay: This is the earliest birth of Art's embrace....
I've gotten it, thanks to your courtesy; And I have read it twenty times or so: Thus much may your sharp snarling profit you, As food our flesh filled to satiety....
When masters bind a slave with cruel chain, And keep him hope-forlorn in bondage pent, Use tames his temper to imprisonment, And hardly would he fain be free again....
When that which is divine in us doth try To shape a face, both brain and hand unite To give, from a mere model frail and slight, Life to the stone by Art's free energy....
The sugar, candles, and the saddled mule, Together with your cask of malvoisie, So far exceed all my necessity That Michael and not I my debt must rule,...
Far more than I was wont myself I prize: With you within my heart I rise in rate, Just as a gem engraved with delicate Devices o'er the uncut stone doth rise;...
Mid weariness and woe I find some cheer In thinking of the past, when I recall My weakness and my sins, and reckon all The vain expense of days that disappear:...
Not less elate than smitten with wild woe To see not them but Thee by death undone, Were those blest souls, when Thou above the sun Didst raise, by dying, men that lay so low:...
Choice soul, in whom, as in a glass, we see, Mirrored in thy pure form and delicate, What beauties heaven and nature can create, The paragon of all their works to be!...