“Is’t your will with me to toy? 
    I’ll not mate with man or boy: 
    Like the Phoenix, to enjoy
    Single life shall be my joy.”

He.
    “Yet Love is tyrannous,
    Harsh, fierce, imperious! 
    He who man’s heart can thus
      Shatter, may make to bow
      Maidens as stern as thou!”

She.
    “Now by your words I’m ’ware
    What you wish, what you are;
    You know love well, I swear! 
      So I’ll be loved by you;
      Now I’m on fire too!”

XVI.

Some semi-descriptive pieces, which connect the songs of Spring with lyrics of a more purely personal emotion, can boast of rare beauty in the original.

The most striking of these, upon the theme of Sleep and Love, I have tried to render in trochaic verse, feeling it impossible, without knowledge of the medieval melody, to reproduce its complicated and now only half-intelligible rhythms.

A DESCANT UPON SLEEP AND LOVE.

No. 27.

    When the lamp of Cynthia late
    Rises in her silver state,
    Through her brother’s roseate light,
    Blushing on the brows of night;
    Then the pure ethereal air
    Breathes with zephyr blowing fair;
    Clouds and vapours disappear. 
    As with chords of lute or lyre,
    Soothed the spirits now respire,
    And the heart revives again
    Which once more for love is fain. 
    But the orient evening star
    Sheds with influence kindlier far
    Dews of sweet sleep on the eye
    Of o’er-tired mortality.

    Oh, how blessed to take and keep
    Is the antidote of sleep! 
    Sleep that lulls the storms of care
    And of sorrow unaware,
    Creeping through the closed doors
    Of the eyes, and through the pores
    Breathing bliss so pure and rare
    That with love it may compare.

    Then the god of dreams doth bring
    To the mind some restful thing,
    Breezes soft that rippling blow
    O’er ripe cornfields row by row,
    Murmuring rivers round whose brim
    Silvery sands the swallows skim,
    Or the drowsy circling sound
    Of old mill-wheels going round,
    Which with music steal the mind
    And the eyes in slumber bind.

    When the deeds of love are done
    Which bland Venus had begun,
    Languor steals with pleasant strain
    Through the chambers of the brain,
    Eyes ’neath eyelids gently tired
    Swim and seek the rest desired. 
    How deliriously at last
    Into slumber love hath passed! 
    But how sweeter yet the way
    Which leads love again to play!