42 Hartley Burr Alexander 



Love is a prettie frencie, 

 A melancholy fire, 



Begot by lookes, 



Maintained with hopes, 

 And heythen'd by desire. 



Love is a pretie tyrant 

 By our affections armed, 



Take them away. 



None lives this day, 

 The coward boy hath harmed. 



Love is a pretie idole, 

 Opinion did devise him, 



His votaries 



Is sloth and lies, 

 The robes that do disguise him. 



Love is a pretie painter, 

 And counterfeiteth passion, 



His shadow'd lies, 



Makes fansies rise, 

 To set beliefe in fashion. 



Love is a pretie pedler, 



Whose packe is fraught with sorrowes, 



With doubts, with feares, 



With sighs, with teares, 

 Some joyes — but those he borrowes. 



Love is a pretie nothing, 

 Yet what a quoile it keepes, 



With thousand eyes 



Of jealousies, 

 Yet no one ever sleepes. 



The singing note is unmistakable enough, but there is no on- 

 ward echo after the singing is done, as in the true song. It is 

 all a dainty flitting from conceit to conceit, as of a bee fasti- 

 dious among flower-bells. This is a customary character of 

 not a little of the poetry of the period. An advance toward 

 organic unity, however, is met in Crashaw's Weeper, which, 

 though a series of idle toyings with the Magdalen's tears, as if 

 they were in truth the pearls the poet would have them, yet in 



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