an care or pain,
May the heavenly order change;
She will hate her own disdain,
And repent she was so strange:
For a truer heart than I,
Never lived, nor loved to die.

From JOHN DOWLAND's _First Book of Songs and Airs_, 1597.

If my complaints could passions move,
Or make Love see wherein I suffer wrong;
My passions were enough to prove
That my despairs had governed me too long.
O Love, I live and die in thee!
Thy wounds do freshly bleed in me.

Thy grief in my deep sighs still speaks,
Yet thou dost hope when I despair;
My heart for thy unkindness breaks;
Thou say'st thou can'st my harms repair,
And when I hope thou mak'st me hope in vain;
Yet for redress thou let'st me still complain.

Can Love be rich, and yet I want?
Is Love my judge, and yet am I condemned?
Thou plenty hast, yet me dost scant;
Thou made a god, and yet thy power contemned!
That I do live, it is thy power;
That I desire it is thy worth.

If love doth make men's lives too sour,
Let me not love, nor live henceforth!
Die shall my hopes, but not my faith,
That you, that of my fall may hearers be,
May hear Despair, which truly saith
"I was more true to Love, than Love to me."

From THOMAS CAMPION's _Third Book of Airs_ (circ. 1613).

If thou long'st so much to learn, sweet boy, what 'tis to love,
Do but fix thy thoughts on me and thou shalt quickly prove:
Little suit at first shall win
Way to thy abashed desire,
But then will I hedge thee in,
Salamander-like, with fire.

With thee dance I will, and sing, and thy fond dalliance bear;
We the grovy hills will climb and play the wantons there;
Other whiles we'll gather flowers,
Lying dallying on the grass;
And thus our delightful hours,
Full of waking dreams, shall pass.

When thy joys were thus at height, my love should turn from thee,
Old acquaintance then should grow as strange, as strange might be:
Twenty rivals thou shouldst find,
Breaking all their hearts for me,
While to all I'll prove more kind
And more forward than to thee.

Thus thy silly youth, enraged, would soon my love defy,
But, alas, poor soul, too late! clipt wings can never fly.
Those sweet hours which we had