After yesterday’s spirited disquisition on money and avarice, here is the seventeenth-century Metaphysical master George Herbert in more familiar mode. This little poem on mortality communicates a tranquillity of belief that the clergyman poet did not always show. The spelling is original. -- Lesley Duncan

VERTUE

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and skie,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
They root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.