t that his lady after she knew of his love kept her face_
_alway hidden from him._)

"I never saw my lady lay apart
Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat,
Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great;
Which other fancies driveth from my heart,
That to myself I do the thought reserve,
The which unwares did wound my woeful breast.
But on her face mine eyes mought never rest
Yet, since she knew I did her love, and serve
Her golden tresses clad alway with black,
Her smiling looks that hid[es] thus evermore
And that restrains which I desire so sore.
So doth this cornet govern me, alack!
In summer sun, in winter's breath, a frost
Whereby the lights of her fair looks I lost."[3]

[3] As printed exactly in both first and second editions this sonnet is
evidently corrupt, and the variations between the two are additional
evidence of this. I have ventured to change "hid" to "hides" in line 10,
and to alter the punctuation in line 13. If the reader takes "that" in line
5 as = "so that," "that" in line 10 as = "which" (_i.e._ "black"), and
"that" in line 11 with "which," he will now, I think, find it intelligible.
Line 13 is usually printed:

"In summer, sun: in winter's breath, a frost."

Now no one would compare a black silk hood to the sun, and a reference to
line 2 will show the real meaning. The hood is a frost which lasts through
summer and winter alike.

(_Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea._)

"Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile,
Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me a while.
And such as by their lords do set but little price,
Let them sit still: it skills them not what chance come on the dice.
But ye whom love hath bound by order of desire,
To love your lords whose good deserts none other would require,
Come ye yet once again and set your foot by mine,
Whose woeful plight and sorrows great, no tongue can well define."[4]

[4] In reading these combinations it must be remembered that there is
always a strong caesura in the midst of the first and Alexandrine line. It
is the Alexandrine which Mr. Browning has imitated in _Fifine_, not that of
Drayton, or of the various practitioners of the Spenserian stanza from
Spenser himself downwards.

"It was the(n)[5] night; the sound and quiet sleep
Had through the earth the weary bodies caught