I lived so tranquil, with my lot content,
    No sorrow visited, nor envy pined,
    To other loves if fortune were more kind
    One pang of mine their thousand joys outwent;
    But those bright eyes, whence never I repent
    The pains I feel, nor wish them less to find,
    So dark a cloud and heavy now does blind,
    Seems as my sun of life in them were spent. 
    O Nature! mother pitiful yet stern,
    Whence is the power which prompts thy wayward deeds,
    Such lovely things to make and mar in turn? 
    True, from one living fount all power proceeds: 
    But how couldst Thou consent, great God of Heaven,
    That aught should rob the world of what thy love had given?

    MACGREGOR.

SONNET CXCVI.

Vincitore Alessandro l’ ira vinse.

THE EVIL RESULTS OF UNRESTRAINED ANGER.

      What though the ablest artists of old time
    Left us the sculptured bust, the imaged form
    Of conq’ring Alexander, wrath o’ercame
    And made him for the while than Philip less? 
    Wrath to such fury valiant Tydeus drove
    That dying he devour’d his slaughter’d foe;
    Wrath made not Sylla merely blear of eye,
    But blind to all, and kill’d him in the end. 
    Well Valentinian knew that to such pain
    Wrath leads, and Ajax, he whose death it wrought. 
    Strong against many, ’gainst himself at last. 
    Wrath is brief madness, and, when unrestrain’d,
    Long madness, which its master often leads
    To shame and crime, and haply e’en to death.

    ANON.

SONNET CXCVII.

Qual ventura mi fu, quando dall’ uno.

HE REJOICES AT PARTICIPATING IN HER SUFFERINGS.

      Strange, passing strange adventure! when from one
    Of the two brightest eyes which ever were,
    Beholding it with pain dis urb’d and dim,
    Moved influence which my own made dull and weak. 
    I had return’d, to break the weary fast
    Of seeing her, my sole care in this world,
    Kinder to me were Heaven and Love than e’en
    If all their other gifts together join’d,
    When from the right eye—­rather the right sun—­
    Of my dear Lady to my right eye came
    The ill which less my pain than pleasure makes;
    As if it intellect possess’d and wings
    It pass’d, as stars that shoot along the sky: 
    Nature and pity then pursued their course.

    ANON.

SONNET CXCVIII.

O cameretta che gia fosti un porto.

HE NO LONGER FINDS RELIEF IN SOLITUDE.