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92 FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES
All the verses of the seven poems are rhymed ;
one place only
is the rhyme omitted, exactly as was the
case in the plays, and a word is introduced evidently
not the one which the author had in his mind. The
omission occurs in the two final stanzas of the short
1 2 6th Psalm :
O Lord, turn our Captivity, (!)
As Winds that blow at South,
Do pour the Tides with violence (!?)
Back to the River's Mouth.
in
Who sowes in Tears, shall reap in Joy, (!)
The Lord doth so ordain ;
So that his Seed be pure and good (!?)
His harvest shall be Gain.
In both stanzas the first and third lines do not
rhyme, which are rhymed in the preceding stanzas.
Bacon had evidently suppressed a word rhyming to
" "
Captivity (possibly " "
Privity ?), replacing it by the
word "violence"; and another rhyming to "Joy"
(possibly "coy"?), and leaving the reader to guess it
The " line, So that his Seed be pure and good,"
ends on far too weak a word for a man of thought as
Bacon was.
The seed of the sower who penned that
verse was "coy, "was "purely "and "coyly "sown;
"coyly" conveying pretty well the same idea as
"
curiously."
But a surprise of a different kind a surprise similar
to that we met with in the Shakespeare Plays and also
in the preface to Shakespeare
is afforded us in the
dedicatory epistle to the book. The slim little volume
containing the Seven Psalms is dedicated to Bacon's
young friend, the author of religious poems, George