| WAS it the proud full sail of his great verse | |
| Bound for the prize of all too precious you, | |
| That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, | |
| Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? | |
| Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write | 5 |
| Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? | |
| No, neither he, nor his compeers by night | |
| Giving him aid, my verse astonished. | |
| He, nor that affable familiar ghost | |
| Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, | 10 |
| As victors of my silence cannot boast; | |
| I was not sick of any fear from thence: | |
| But when your countenance fill’d up his line, | |
| Then lack’d I matter; that enfeebled mine. |