Rose-cheeked Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

These lines come from one of Thomas Campion’s early-17th-century lyric songs, written to be performed with music in the milieu of English courtly entertainment. Campion—both poet and composer—often crafted verses that explicitly address singing and musical accompaniment, blurring the boundary between verbal and instrumental “music.” The speaker calls on “Laura,” a conventional Petrarchan beloved-name, to join in song; the poem’s setting is implicitly intimate and performative, as if inviting a soloist to match vocal melody with the “silent music” of physical beauty. The excerpt reflects Campion’s characteristic fusion of art-song sensibility with love-lyric conventions.

The passage treats beauty as a kind of music: Laura’s appearance produces a “silent” harmony that can be complemented by actual song. The speaker urges her to “sing…smoothly,” suggesting that voice and visage should mutually “grace” one another—art enhancing nature, and nature dignifying art. Campion’s phrasing also hints at the Renaissance ideal of proportion and concord: outward loveliness is imagined as ordered, almost audible, and the beloved becomes both performer and instrument. The effect is to elevate courtship into aesthetic collaboration, where love is expressed through refined, balanced artistry rather than raw declaration.