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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  William Cartwright (1611–1643)

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

On a Virtuous Young Gentlewoman That Died Suddenly

William Cartwright (1611–1643)

SHE who to Heaven more Heaven doth annex,

Whose lowest thought was above all our sex,

Accounted nothing death but t’ be reprieved,

And died as free from sickness as she lived.

Others are dragged away, or must be driven,

She only saw her time and stept to Heaven;

Where seraphims view all her glories o’er,

As one returned that had been there before.

For while she did this lower world adorn,

Her body seemed rather assumed than born;

So rarified, advanced, so pure and whole,

That body might have been another’s soul;

And equally a miracle it were

That she could die, or that she could live here.