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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  William Browne (c. 1590–c. 1645) or Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

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

Epitaph on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke

William Browne (c. 1590–c. 1645) or Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

UNDERNEATH this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse,

Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother:

Death, ere thou hast slain another,

Fair, and learn’d, and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

Marble piles let no man raise

To her name: in after days,

Some kind woman born as she,

Reading this, like Niobe

Shall turn marble, and become

Both her mourner and her tomb.