To the Countess of Salisbury, August 1614

Fair, great, and good, since seeing you we see / What heaven can do, what any earth can be; / Since now your beauty shines; now, when the sun, / Grown stale, is to so low a value run, / That his dishevell'd beams, and scatter'd fires / Serve but for ladies' periwigs and tires / In lovers' sonnets, you come to repair / God's book of creatures, teaching what is fair; / Since now, when all is wither'd, shrunk, and dried, / All virtues ebb'd out to a dead, low tide, / All the world's frame being crumbled into sand, / Where every man thinks by himself to stand, / Integrity, friendship, and confidence, / Cements of greatness, being vapour'd hence, / And narrow man being fill'd with little shares, / Court, city, church are all shops of smallwares; / All having blown to sparks their noble fire, / And drawn their sound gold ingot into wire; / All trying by a love of littleness / To make abridgments, and to draw to less / Even that nothing which at first we were; / Since in these times your greatness doth appear, / And that we learn by it, that man, to get / Towards Him that's infinite, must first be great: / Since in an age so ill, as none is fit / So much as to accuse, much less mend it / -For who can judge, or witness of those times, / Where all alike are guilty of the crimes? / Where he that would be good, is thought by all / A monster, or at best fantastical- / Since now you durst be good, and that I do / Discern by daring to contemplate you, / That there may be degrees of fair, great, good, / Through your light, largeness, virtue, understood; / If in this sacrifice of mine be shown / Any small spark of these, call it your own / And if things like these have been said by me / Of others, call not that idolatry; / For had God made man first, and man had seen / The third day's fruits and flowers, and various green, / He might have said the best that he could say / Of those fair creatures which were made that day; / And when next day he had admired the birth / Of sun, moon, stars, fairer than late-prais'd earth, / He might have said the best that he could say, / And not be chid for praising yesterday; / So though some things are not together true, / As, that another's worthiest, and, that you; / Yet, to say so, doth not condemn a man, / If, when he spoke them, they were both true then. / How fair a proof of this in our soul grows; / We first have souls of growth and sense; and those, / When our last soul, our soul immortal, came, / Were swallow'd into it, and have no name. / Nor doth he injure those souls, which doth cast / The power and praise of both them on the last; / No more do I wrong any, if I adore / The same things now which I adored before, / The subject changed, and measure; the same thing / In a low constable, and in the king / I reverence, his power to work on me / So did I humbly reverence each degree / Of fair, great, good, but more, now I am come / From having found their walks, to find their home. / And as I owe my first souls thanks, that they / For my last soul did fit and mould my clay, / So am I debtor unto them, whose worth / Enabled me to profit, and take forth / This new great lesson, thus to study you; / Which none, not reading others first, could do. / Nor lack I light to read this book, though I / In a dark cave, yea, in a grave do lie; / For as your fellow-angels, so you do / Illustrate them who come to study you. / The first whom we in histories do find / To have profess'd all arts, was one born blind; / He lack'd those eyes beasts have as well as we, / Not those by which angels are seen and see. / So, though I'm born without those eyes to live, / Which fortune, who hath none herself, doth give, / Which are fit means to see bright courts and you, / Yet, may I see you thus, as now I do, / I shall by that all goodness have discern'd, / And though I burn my library, be learn'd.