Lastly, to believe themselves, when they
tell you they will make you immortal by their verses.
Thus doing, your names shall flourish in the printers' shops: thus
doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface: thus doing,
you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all: you shall
dwell upon superlatives: thus doing, though you be "Libertino patre
natus," you shall suddenly grow "Herculea proles,"
"Si quid mea Carmina possunt:"
thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante's Beatrix, or
Virgil's Anchisis.
But if (fie of such a but!) you be born so near the dull-making
cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of
poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift
itself up to look to the sky of poetry, or rather, by a certain
rustical disdain, will become such a Mome, as to be a Momus of
poetry; then, though I will not wish unto you the ass's ears of
Midas, nor to be driven by a poet's verses, as Bubonax was, to hang
himself; nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in
Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all
poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour,
for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die
from the earth for want of an epitaph.
POEMS
POEM: TWO PASTORALS
Made by Sir Philip Sidney, upon his meeting with his two worthy
friends and fellow poets, Sir Edward Dyer and M.
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