I Think I Could Turn And Live With Animals, They Are So Placid And Self-Contain’d
(Other Writ, Animals, Melancholy, Poetry)‘So that I, finding my service by this means lightly regarded, my affection despised, and myself unknown, remained no fuller of desire than void of counsel how to come to my desire; which, alas, if these trees could speak, they might well witness. For many times have I stood here, bewailing myself unto them. Many times have I, leaning to yonder palm, admired the blessedness of it that it could bear love without sense of pain. Many times, when my master’s cattle came hither to chew their cud in this fresh place, I might see the young bull testify his love, but how ? With proud looks and joyfulness.
‘”O wretched mankind,’ said I then to myself, “in whom wit, which should be the governor of his welfare, becomes the traitor to his blessedness ! These beasts, like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly: we, like bastards, are laid abroad, even as foundlings to be trained up by grief and sorrow. Their minds grudge not at their bodies’ comfort, nor their senses are letted from enjoying their objects: we have the impediments of honour and the torments of conscience.’
‘Truly in such cogitations have I sometimes so long stood that methought my feet began to grow into the ground, with such a darkness and heaviness of mind that I might easily have been persuaded to have resigned over my very essence. But love ( which one time layeth burdens, another time giveth wings ) when I was at the lowest of my downward thoughts, pulled up my heart to remember that nothing is achieved before it be throughly attempted, and that lying still doth never go forward; and that therefore it was time, now or never, to sharpen my invention to pierce through the hardness of this enterprise, never ceasing to assemble all my conceits one after the other how to manifest both my mind and estate.’
Sir Philip Sidney : The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
