Ah sweet content, where is thy mylde abode?Related post: Sweet Content (by Brian Fairfax).
Is it with shepheardes and light-harted swaynes?
Which sing vpon the downes and pype abroade
Tending their flockes and cattell on the playnes?
Ah sweet content, where doest thou safely rest?
In heauen, with Angels which the prayses sing
Of him that made and rules at his behest
The mindes, and harts of euery liuing thing?
Ah sweet content, where doth thine harbour hold,
Is it in Churches, with Religious men,
Which please the goddes with prayers manifold,
And in their studies meditate it then.
Whether thou doest in heauen, or earth appeare,
Be where thou wilt, thou wilt not harbour here.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, July 27, 2014
Sweet Content
Barnabe Barnes (1571-1609), Sonnet LXVI, in Parthenophil and Parthenophe: A Critical Edition, ed. Victor A. Doyno (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 40-41: