William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.
Life, a BubbleWilliam Drummond of Hawthornden (15851649)
T
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children’s breath,
Who chase it everywhere
And strive who can most motion it bequeath:
And though it sometime seem of its own might,
Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height;
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;
For when ’tis most admirèd, in a thought,
Because it erse was naught, it turns to naught.