I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize His artificial grief that scans his eyes; Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I Confine them to the Muses' rosary? I am no poet here; my pen's the spout Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out, In pity of that name, whose fate we see Thus copied out in grief's hydrography. The Muses are not mermaids, though upon His death the ocean might turn Helicon. The sea's too rough for verse; who rhymes upon 't With Xerxes strives to fetter th' Hellespont. My tears will keep no channel, know no laws To guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause, Run with disturbance till they swallow me As a description of his misery. But can his spacious virtue find a grave Within th' imposthum'd bubble of a wave? Whose learning if we sound, we must confess The sea but shallow, and him bottomless. Could not the winds to countermand thy death With their whole card of lungs redeem thy breath? Or some new island in thy rescue peep To heave thy resurrection from the deep, That so the world might see thy safety wrought With no less miracle than thyself was thought? The famous Stagirite, who in his life Had Nature as familiar as his wife, Bequeath'd his widow to survive with thee, Queen Dowager of all philosophy: An ominous legacy, that did portend Thy fate and predecessor's second end. Some have affirm'd, that what on earth we find, The sea can parallel in shape and kind: Books, arts, and tongues were wanting, but in thee Neptune hath got an university. We'll dive no more for pearls; the hope to see Thy sacred reliques of mortality Shall welcome storms, and make the seaman prize His shipwreck now, more than his merchandise. He shall embrace the waves and to thy tomb (As to a royaler exchange) shall come. What can we now expect? Water and fire Both elements our ruin do conspire. And that dissolves us which doth us compound, One Vatican was burnt, another drown'd. We of the gown our libraries must toss To understand the greatness of our loss; Be pupils to our grief and so much grow In learning as our sorrows overflow. When we have fill'd the rundlets of our eyes We'll issue 't forth, and vent such elegies As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas, We, floating islands, living Hebrides.