| |
| AND now behold your tender nurse, the air, | |
| And common neighbor that aye runs around, | |
| How many pictures and impressions fair | |
| Within her empty regions are there found, | |
| Which to your senses dancing do propound! | 5 |
| For what are breath, speech, echoes, music, winds, | |
| But dancings of the air in sundry kinds? | |
| |
| For when you breathe, the air in order moves, | |
| Now in, now out, in time and measure true; | |
| And when you speak, so well she dancing loves, | 10 |
| That doubling oft, and oft redoubling new, | |
| With thousand forms she doth herself endue: | |
| For all the words that from your lips repair, | |
| Are naught but tricks and turnings of the air. | |
| |
| Hence is her prattling daughter, Echo, born, | 15 |
| That dances to all voices she can hear: | |
| There is no sound so harsh that she doth scorn, | |
| Nor any time wherein she will forbear | |
| The airy pavement with her feet to wear: | |
| And yet her hearing sense is nothing quick, | 20 |
| For after time she endeth every trick. | |
| |
| And thou, sweet Music, dancing’s only life, | |
| The ear’s sole happiness, the air’s best speech, | |
| Loadstone of fellowship, charming-rod of strife, | |
| The soft mind’s paradise, the sick mind’s leech— | 25 |
| With thine own tongue thou trees and stones canst teach, | |
| That, when the air doth dance her finest measure, | |
| Then art thou born, the gods’ and men’s sweet pleasure. | |
| |
| Lastly, where keep the winds their revelry, | |
| Their violent turnings, and wild whirling hays, | 30 |
| But in the air’s translucent gallery, | |
| Where she herself is turned a hundred ways, | |
| While with these maskers wantonly she plays? | |
| Yet in this misrule, they such rule embrace, | |
| As two at once encumber not the place. | 35 |
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