William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). Life, a Bubble. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

Life, a Bubble

By William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649)


THIS Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children’s breath,
Who chase it everywhere
And strive who can most motion it bequeath:	5
And though it sometime seem of its own might,
Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height;
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;	10
For when ’tis most admirèd, in a thought,
Because it erse was naught, it turns to naught.