Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Laura—Part III

XXXI. “My Mistress seems but brown,” say you to me

Robert Tofte (1561–1620)

“MY Mistress seems but brown,” say you to me.

’Tis very true, and I confess the same:

Yet love I her although that brown She be;

Because to please me, She is glad and fain.

I lovèd one most beautiful before;

Whom now, as death, I deadly do abhor.

Because to scorn my service her I found;

I gave her o’er, and chose to me this same.

Nor to be faithful, think I, I am bound

To one, in whom no kindness doth remain.

This is the cause, for brown and pitiful;

I left a fair, but yet a faithless, Trull.