Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to came would say this Poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d early faces.
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorn’d, like old man of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term’d a Poet’s rage,
And stretched metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice in it and in my rhyme.