Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There’s naught in this life sweet
But only melancholy;
O sweetest melancholy!

These lines are from an early-17th-century lyric commonly attributed to the Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher. The poem circulates under the title “Melancholy” and reflects a fashionable Renaissance/Jacobean preoccupation with melancholy as both a temperament and a cultivated aesthetic (linked to love, contemplation, and artistic sensibility). In this milieu, “vain delights” and nocturnal revels are treated as fleeting and morally suspect, while melancholy is paradoxically praised as the most enduring “sweet” in life. The lyric’s tone and address suggest a speaker renouncing transient pleasures in favor of a more inward, chastened emotional truth.

The speaker dismisses “vain delights” as brief as the nights in which people squander their “folly,” stressing the speed with which pleasure evaporates. Against this transience, the poem elevates melancholy—not merely sadness, but a reflective, clarifying mood—as the only lasting sweetness life offers. The oxymoron “sweetest melancholy” captures a Jacobean sensibility in which sorrow can be aesthetically and morally superior to shallow amusement: melancholy deepens perception, sobers desire, and lends emotional gravity to experience. The passage thus reads as both a moral rebuke of hedonism and a celebration of the bittersweet intensity that art and introspection can preserve.