This is the braver path: time soone can smother
The dear-bought spoils and tropheis of the other.
How many fiery heroes have there been,
Whose triumphs were as soone forgot as seen?
Because they wanted some diviner one
To rescue
from night, and make known.
Such art thou to thy selfe. While others dream
Strong flatt'ries on a fain'd or borrow'd theam,
Thou shalt remaine in thine owne lustre bright,
And adde unto 't LUCASTA'S chaster light.
For none so fit to sing great things as he,
That can act o're all lights of poetry.
Thus had Achilles his owne gests design'd,
He had his genius Homer far outshin'd.
Jo. Hall.<<9.2>>
<9.1> Original has ASPIRE.
<9.2> The precocious author of HORAE VACIVAE, 1646, and
of a volume of poems which was printed in the same year.
In the LUCASTA are some complimentary lines by Lovelace
on Hall's translation of the commentary of Hierocles on
the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, 1657.
TO THE HONORABLE, VALIANT, AND INGENIOUS COLONEL RICHARD LOVELACE,
ON HIS EXQUISITE POEMS.
Poets and painters have some near relation,
Compar'd with fancy and imagination;
The one paints shadowed persons (in pure kind),
The other paints the pictures of the mind
In purer verse. And as rare Zeuxes fame
Shin'd, till Apelles art eclips'd the same
By a more exquisite and curious line
In Zeuxeses (with pensill far more fine),
So have our modern poets late done well,
Till thine appear'd (which scarce have paralel).
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