Page:Shepheards Calendar-Crane 1898.djvu/37



This glogue is rather moral and general than bent to any secret or particular purpose. It specially containeth a discourse of old age, in the person of Thenot, an old shepheard, who, for his crookedness and unlustiness, is scorned of Cuddie, an unhappy herdman’s boy. The matter very well accordeth with the season of the moneth, the year now drooping, and as it were drawing to his last age. For as in this time of year, so then in our bodies, there is a dry and withering cold, which congealeth the curdled blood, and freezeth the weather-beaten flesh, with storms of Fortune and hoar-frosts of Care. To which purpose the old man telleth a tale of the Oak and the Brier, so lively, and so feelingly, as, if the thing were set forth in some picture before our eyes, more plainly could not appear.

CUDDIE. THENOT.

CUDDIE.

Ah for pity! will rank winter’s rage

These bitter blasts never gin t’ assuage?

The keen cold blows through my beaten hide,

All as I were through the body gride:

My ragged ronts all shiver and shake,

As doen high towers in an earthquake:

They wont in the wind wag their wriggle tails

Perk as a peacock; but now it availes.

THE. Lewdly complainest, thou lazy lad,

Of winter’s wrack for making thee sad.

Must not the world wend in his common course,

From good to bad, and from bad to worse,

From worse unto that is worst of all,

And then return to his former fall?