Self-subsistence of the Soul.

SHE is a vine, which doth no propping need,
To make her spread herself, or spring upright;
She is a star, whose beams do not proceed
From any sun, but from a native light.

When of the dew, which the eye and ear do take,
From flowers abroad, and bring into the brain;
She doth within both wax and honey make :
This work is hers, this is her proper pain.

When in effects she doth the causes know;

And seeing the stream, thinks where the spring doth rise ;

And seeing the branch, conceives the root below: These things she views without the body's eyes.

These actions in her closet, all alone,

Retired within herself, she doth fulfil;
Use of her body's organs she hath none,
When she doth use the powers of wit and will.

Yet in the body's prison so she lies,

As through the body's windows she must look, Her diverse powers of sense to exercise,

By gathering notes out of the world's great book.

Nor can herself discourse or judge of aught,
But what the sense collects, and home doth bring;
And yet the powers of her discoursing thought,
From these collections is a diverse thing.

For though our eyes can nought but colours see,
Yet colours give them not their power of sight;
So, though these fruits of sense her objects be,
Yet she discerns them by her proper light.

And so the soul, which is a lady free,
Doth the full justice of her state maintain;
Because the senses ready servants be,

Attending nigh about her court, the brain.

By them the forms of outward things she learns,
For they return unto the fantasy,
Whatever each of them abroad discerns,
And there enrol it for the mind to see.

But when she sits to judge the good and ill,
And to discern betwixt the false and true,
She is not guided by the senses' skill,

But doth each thing in her own mirror view.

Then she the senses checks, which oft do err,
And even against their false reports decrees;
And oft she doth condemn what they prefer;
For with a power above the sense she sees.

Therefore no sense the precious joys conceives,
Which in her private contemplations be;
For then the ravished spirit the senses leaves,
Hath her own powers, and proper actions free.

Her harmonies are sweet and full of skill,
When on the body's instruments she plays;
But the proportions of the wit and will,

Those sweet accords are even the angels' lays.

Then her self-being nature shines in this,

;

That she performs her noblest works alone
The work, the touchstone of the nature is;
And by their operations, things are known.'

SIR JOHN DAVIES.

Spirituality of the Soul.

BUT though this substance be the root of sense,
Sense knows her not, which doth but bodies know:
She is a spirit, and heavenly influence,

Which from the fountain of God's Spirit doth flow.

For she all natures under heaven doth pass,
Being like those Spirits which God's bright face do

see,

Or like Himself, whose image once she was,
Though now, alas! she scarce his shadow be.

For of all forms, she holds the first degree,
That are to gross material bodies knit;

Yet she herself is bodiless and free,

And, though confined, is almost infinite.

From their gross matter she abstracts the forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms,
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

This doth she, when, from things particular,
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
Which bodiless and immaterial are,

And can be only lodged within our minds.

Since body and soul have such diversities,

Well might we muse how first their match began ; But that we learn, that he that spread the skies, And fixed the earth, first formed the soul in man.

SIR JOHN DAVIES.

Know Thyself.

AND yet, alas! when all our lamps are burn'd,
Our bodies wasted, and our spirits spent ;
When we have all the learned volumes turn'd,
Which yield men's wits both help and ornament;

What can we know, or what can we discern,
When error clouds the windows of the mind?
The diverse forms of things how can we learn,
That have been ever from our birth-day blind?

When Reason's lamp, which, like the sun in sky, Throughout man's little world her beams did spread,

Is now become a sparkle, which doth lie

Under the ashes, half extinct and dead;

How can we hope that through the

eye

and ear,

This dying sparkle in this cloudy place, Can recollect those beams of knowledge clear,

Which were infused in the first minds by grace?

The wits that div'd most deep and soar'd most high, Seeking man's powers, have found his weakness

such;

Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly;

We learn so little, and forget so much.

All things without, which round about we see,
We seek to know, and how therewith to do;
But that whereby we reason, live, and be,

Within ourselves, we strangers are thereto.

We seek to know the moving of each sphere,

And the strange cause o' th' ebbs and floods of
Nile;

But of that clock, which in our breasts we bear,
The subtile motions we forget the while.

We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,
And pass both tropics, and behold both poles,
When we come home, are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own souls.

For this few know themselves; for merchants broke,
View their estate with discontent and pain;

As seas are troubled, when they do revoke
Their flowing waves into themselves again.

And while the face of outward things we find
Pleasing and fair, agreeable and sweet,
These things transport and carry out the mind,
That with herself the mind can never meet.

Yet if affliction once her wars begin,

And threat the feebler sense with sword and fire, The mind contracts herself, and shrinketh in, And to herself she gladly doth retire.

If aught can teach us aught, affliction's looks,
Making us pry into ourselves so near,
Teach us to know ourselves beyond our books,
Or all the learned schools that ever were.