'Twill be exacted of your name, whose son, Whose nephew, whose grandchild you are;

And men

Which must be now,

They teach you how.

And he that stays

To live until to-morrow', hath lost two days.

So may you live in honour, as in name,
If with this truth you be inspired;

So may
This day

Be more, and long desired;

And with the flame

The birth-day shines, when logs not burn, but men.

XV.

TO HEAVEN.

SOOD and great God! can I not think of
thee,

But it must straight my melancholy be?
Is it interpreted in me disease,

That, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?
O be thou witness, that the reins dost know
And hearts of all, if I be sad for show;
And judge me after if I dare pretend
To aught but grace, or aim at other end.
As thou art all, so be thou all to me,

First, midst, and last, converted One, and Three!
My faith, my hope, my love; and in this state,

My judge, my witness, and my advocate.
Where have I been this while exiled from thee,
And whither rapt, now thou but stoop'st to me?
Dwell, dwell here still! O, being every where,
How can I doubt to find thee ever here?

I know my state, both full of shame and scorn,
Conceived in sin, and unto labour born,
Standing with fear, and must with horror fall,
And destined unto judgment, after all.

I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground,
Upon my flesh t' inflict another wound :1
Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death,
With holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath
Of discontent; or that these prayers be
For weariness of life, not love of thee.2

Upon my flesh to inflict another wound.] Opposite to this passage, Whalley has written, in the margin of the old folio, "Des Barreaux' Sonnet." What resemblance he found between this lowly expression of a broken spirit, and the daring familiarity of Des Barreaux' defiance, it is not easy to discover. I have nothing to object to the poetry of the Sonnet: its language too is good, but its sentiments are dreadful.

If Jonson had any thing in view besides the Scriptures, in this place, it might be the following verse of Euripides, which is quoted by Longinus, and praised for its nervous conciseness :

Γεμω κακων δη· κ' ουκετ ̓ εσθ' όπη τέθη

2 This is an admirable prayer: solemn, pious, and scriptural. Jonson's religious impressions were deep and awful. He had, like all of us, his moments of forgetfulness; but whenever he returned to himself, he was humble, contrite, and believing.

UNDERWOODS.] From the second folio, 1641. The poems collected under this head, (with the exception of a small number taken from published volumes,) were found amongst Jonson's papers. Whether he designed them all for the press cannot now be known : it is reasonable to suppose from the imperfect state in which many of them appear, that he did not.-No selection, however, was made, though there appears some rude attempt to arrange them, with a reference to dates; but the disposition of them, in general, is very incomplete, and marks of carelessness and ignorance are visible in every page. Much is misplaced, or mutilated, and more, perhaps, is lost. It is singular that no notice or memorandum of any kind should hand down to us the name or condition of the editor or printer of this unfortunate volume, unless, as there is some reason to suspect, the whole was put to the press surreptitiously.

TO THE READER.

ITH the same leave the ancients called that kind of body Sylva, or "Yλn, in which there were works of divers nature and matter congested; as the multitude call timber-trees promiscuously growing, a Wood or Forest; so I am bold to entitule these lesser poems of later growth, by this of UNDERWOOD, out of the analogy they hold to the Forest in my former book, and no otherwise.

BEN JONSON.