Where honour or where conscience _does_ not bind, No other law shall shackle me; Slave to myself I ne'er will be; Nor shall my future actions be confin'd By my own present mind.
Who by resolves and vows engag'd _does_ stand For days, that yet belong to fate, _Does_, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate, Before it falls into his hand; The bondman of the cloister so, All that he _does_ receive _does_ always owe: And still, as time comes in, it goes away, Not to enjoy, but debts to pay! Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell, Which his hour's work, as well as hours, _does_ tell! Unhappy till the last, the kind releasing knell.
His heroick lines are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are sometimes sweet and sonorous.
Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound, _And reach to worlds that must not yet be found_.
Yet bid him go securely, when he sends; _'Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends. The man who has his God, no aid can lack; And we who bid him go, will bring him back._
Yet, amidst his negligence, he sometimes attempted an improved and scientifick versification; of which it will be best to give his own account subjoined to this line:
Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space.
"I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes, which I would have observed in divers other places of this poem, that else will pass for very careless verses: as before,
And overruns the neighb'ring fields with violent course.
Down a precipice deep, down he casts them all.
And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care
Brass was his helmet, his boots brass, and o'er His breast a thick plate of strong brass he wore.
Like some fair pine o'erlooking all th' ignobler wood.
Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong.
"And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is, that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that, out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind themselves to; neither have our English poets observed it, for aught I can find. The Latins (qui musas colunt severiores) sometimes did it; and their prince, Virgil, always, in whom the examples are innumerable, and taken notice of by all judicious men, so that it is superfluous to collect them."