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| HERE doth Dionysia lie: | |
| She whose little wanton foot | |
| Tripping (ah, too carelessly!) | |
| Touch’d this tomb and fell into ’t. | |
| |
| Trip no more shall she, nor fall, | 5 |
| And her trippings were so few! | |
| Summers only eight in all | |
| Had the sweet child wander’d through. | |
| |
| But already life’s few suns | |
| Love’s strong seeds had ripen’d warm, | 10 |
| All her ways were winning ones, | |
| All her cunning was to charm. | |
| |
| And the fancy, in the flower | |
| While the flesh was in the blood, | |
| Childhood’s dawning sex did dower | 15 |
| With warm gusts of womanhood. | |
| |
| O what joys by hope begun, | |
| O what kisses kiss’d by thought, | |
| What love-deeds by fancy done, | |
| Death to endless dust hath wrought! | 20 |
| |
| Had the Fates been kind as thou, | |
| Who, till now, wast never cold, | |
| Once Love’s aptest scholar, now | |
| Thou hadst been his teacher bold. | |
| |
| But if buried seeds upthrow | 25 |
| Fruits and flowers; if flower and fruit | |
| By their nature fitly show | |
| What the seeds are whence they shoot; | |
| |
| Dionysia, o’er this tomb, | |
| Where thy buried beauties be, | 30 |
| From their dust shall spring and bloom | |
| Loves and graces like to thee. | |
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