prose 4
A garden in Rome
If by rain or any other means those ponds were so full they need to be sluiced or let out, even of their superfluities they made melodious use, for they had great wind instruments instead of leaden spouts that went duly in consort, only with this water's rumbling descent....
I saw a banqueting house built round of green marble, like a Theater without: within there was a heaven and earth comprehended both under one roof, the heaven was a clear overhanging vault of crystal, wherein the Sun and Moon and each visible Star had his true similitude, shine, situation and motion, and by what enwrapped art I cannot conceive, these spheres in their proper orbs observed their circular wheelings and turnings, making a certain kind of angelic murmuring in their often windings and goings about, which music the philosophers say in the true heaven by reason of the grossness of our senses we are not capable of (? hearing).......
On the well-clothed boughs of this conspiracy of pine trees against the resembled Sun beams, were perched as many sort of shrill-breasted birds as Summer hath allowed for singing men in her silver chapels. Who though they were bodies without souls, and sweet resembled substances without sense, yet by mathematical experiments of long silver pipes secretly enrinded in the entrails of the boughs whereon they sat and undiscernibly conveyed under their bellies into their small throats, they whistled and freely caroled their natural field note. Neither went those silver pipes straight, but by many-edged unsundered writhings, and crankled wanderings aside strayed from bough to bough into a hundred throats.
Forsooth the tail of the silver pipe stretched itself into the mouth of a great pair of bellows,.... which with the rising and falling of leaden plummets wound up on a wheel did beat up and down incessantly and so gathered in wind, serving with one blast all the snarled pipes to and fro on one tree at once. But so closely were all those organizing implements obscured in the corpulent trunks of the trees, that every man there present renounced conjectures of art, and said it was done by enchantment.
(Part of the one truly lyrical passage in Thomas Nashe's 'The Unfortunate Traveller', a book otherwise full of death, torture, rape, terrible revenges and not for the squeamish! The author (1567 - 1601) wrote this landmark novel, the first of its kind in English, when only 27. It is said that its mixing of fantasy with reality, of vivid inventive English with Rabelaisian wordplay, influenced subsequent writers from Defoe to James Joyce. I feel his poems will manage to insinuate themselves onto these pages in the future.)