Their wealth has wrought my verses harm,
Their sated reader yawns and dozes;
'Tis rarity gives books their charm,
Like early fruits or winter roses.

Let mistresses be coy and hard,
And men will spend their all to win them;
If doors are never shut and barred
They cannot draw young love within them.

A single volume Persius wrote,
But this in every heart enshrined him;
How many now could read or quote
The epics Marsus left behind him?

So if you read a book of mine,
Think it my only publication;
I know more brightly it will shine
In that imagined isolation.