If I said so, despite each contrite sigh,
    Let courtesy for me and kindly feeling die: 
    If I said so, that voice to anger swell,
    Which was so sweet when first her slave I fell: 
    If I said so, I should offend whom I,
    E’en from my earliest breath
    Until my day of death,
    Would gladly take,
    Alone in cloister’d cell my single saint to make.

    But if I said not so, may she who first,
    In life’s green youth, my heart to hope so sweetly nursed,
    Deign yet once more my weary bark to guide
    With native kindness o’er the troublous tide;
    And graceful, grateful, as her wont before,
    When, for I could no more,
    My all, myself I gave,
    To be her slave,
    Forget not the deep faith with which I still adore.

    I did not, could not, never would say so,
    For all that gold can give, cities or courts bestow: 
    Let truth, then, take her old proud seat on high,
    And low on earth let baffled falsehood lie. 
    Thou know’st me, Love! if aught my state within
    Belief or care may win,
    Tell her that I would call
    Him blest o’er all
    Who, doom’d like me to pine, dies ere his strife begin.

    Rachel I sought, not Leah, to secure,
    Nor could I this vain life with other fair endure,
    And, should from earth Heaven summon her again,
    Myself would gladly die
    For her, or with her, when
    Elijah’s fiery car her pure soul wafts on high.

    MACGREGOR.

CANZONE XX.

Ben mi credea passar mio tempo omai.

HE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT SEEING HER, BUT WOULD NOT DIE THAT HE MAY STILL LOVE HER.

      As pass’d the years which I have left behind,
    To pass my future years I fondly thought,
    Amid old studies, with desires the same;
    But, from my lady since I fail to find
    The accustom’d aid, the work himself has wrought
    Let Love regard my tempter who became;
    Yet scarce I feel the shame
    That, at my age, he makes me thus a thief
    Of that bewitching light
    For which my life is steep’d in cureless grief;
    In youth I better might
    Have ta’en the part which now I needs must take,
    For less dishonour boyish errors make.

    Those sweet eyes whence alone my life had health
    Were ever of their high and heavenly charms
    So kind to me when first my thrall begun,
    That, as a man whom not his proper wealth,
    But some extern yet secret succour arms,
    I lived, with them at ease, offending none: 
    Me now their glances shun
    As one injurious and importunate,
    Who, poor and hungry, did
    Myself the very act, in better state
    Which I, in others, chid. 
    From mercy thus if envy bar me, be
    My amorous thirst and helplessness my plea.