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THE FUNERAL.-Page 56.

Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation that I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral; but the earlier lines of the last are fine.

CHARIS' TRIUMPH.-Page 58.

The freshest of Ben Jonson's lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country-phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault, for a blunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, where it says the contrary of what it would say

'But might I of Jove's nectar sup

I would not change for thine;'

and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the argument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must hold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line of it has chanced to get turned in the rhyming.

IN EARTH.-Page 64.

'I never saw anything,' says Charles Lamb, 'like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.'

SONG.-Page 65.

All Drummond's poems seem to be minor poems, even at their finest, except only this. He must have known, for the creation of that poem, some more impassioned and less restless hour. It is, from the outset to the close, the sigh of a profound expectation. There is no division into stanzas, because its metre is the breath of life. One might wish that the English ode (roughly called 'Pindaric') had never been written but with passion, for so written it is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the heart and the breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It has passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley, long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But Drummond's (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. With admirable judgment it was set up at the very gate of that Golden Treasury we all know so well; and, therefore, generation after

generation of readers, who have never opened Drummond's poems, know this fine ode as well as they know any single poem in the whole of English literature. There was a generation that had not been taught by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it. Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called them beautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they might some day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry more complete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that another stanza might have made a final close; but a master's ode has the unity of life, and when it ends it ends for ever.

A poem of Drummond's has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused her, one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool as the very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden increase of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: 'For naught thy cheeks that morn do raise.' What sweet, nay, what

solemn roses!

Again:

'Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations overspread her face.'

The seventeenth century has possession of that 'morn' caught once upon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its freshness to wither it.

TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS.-Page 75.

The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone-not unique, for it had sounded somewhere in mediæval poetry in Italybut in a dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region of tolerance and pardon.

THE PULLEY.-Page 91.

An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses. George Herbert was maladroit in using the word 'rest' in two senses. 'Peace' is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the place of 'rest' in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity. The poem is otherwise perfect beyond description.

MISERY.-Page 94.

George Herbert's work is so perfectly a box where thoughts 'compacted lie,' that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this

'He was a garden in a Paradise.

THE ROSE.-Page 99.

There is nothing else of Waller's fine enough to be admitted here; and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argument of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: "Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love.' This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was-time out of mind-unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.

L'ALLEGRO.-Page 109.

The sock represents the stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.

IL PENSEROSo.-Page 113.

It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian. Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.

LYCIDAS.-Page 119.

Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee;' the great vision' means the apparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael's Mount; Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land's End.

Arethusa and Mincius-Sicilian and Italian streams-represent the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.

ON A PRAYER-BOOK.-Page 131.

'Fair and flagrant things'-Crashaw's own phrase-might serve for a brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line

'Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,'

and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace,

of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth centurynot so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to call a 'rage,' and this expatiated (to use another word of their own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an eighteenth century 'rage.' A'noble rage,' properly provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run upon. He was fancy's child, and the bard of the eighteenth century was the child of common sense with straws in his hair-vainly arranged there. The eighteenth century was never content with a moderate mind; it invented 'rage'; it matched rage with a flagrant diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacant and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be behind no century in passion-nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, 'where to rage'; and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of misgiving as to the resulting verse. Take such a phrase as the madded land'; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage as the last century evoked it. The madded land' is a phrase intended to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodge the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred. 'And dubious title shakes the madded land.' It would be hard to find anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.

Take The Weeper of Crashaw-his most flagrant poem. Its follies are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and abundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the flagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing that general sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I am therefore shy even of citing the 'brisk cherub' who has early sipped the Saint's tear: 'Then to his music,' in Crashaw's divinely simple phrase; and his singing tastes of this breakfast all day long.' Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and when sorrow would be seen in state, then is she drest by none but thee.' Then you come upon the fancy, Fountain and garden in one face.' All places, times, and objects are 'Thy tears' sweet opportunity.' If these charming passages lurk in his worst poems, the reader of this anthology will not be able to count them in his best. In the Epiphany Hymn the heavens have found means

'To disinherit the sun's rise,

Delicately to displace

The day, and plant it fairer in thy face.'

To the Morning: Satisfaction for Sleep, is, all through, luminous. It would be difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of that time, more daylight or more spirit. True, an Elizabethan would not have had poetry so rich as in Love's Horoscope, but yet an Elizabethan would have had it no fresher. The Hymn to St. Teresa has the brevities which this poet-reproached with his longueurs-masters so well. He tells how the Spanish girl, six years old, set out in search of death: 'She's for the Moors and Martyrdom. Sweet, not so fast!' Of many contemporary songs in pursuit of a fugitive Cupid, Crashaw's Cupid's Cryer: out of the Greek, is the most dainty. But if readers should be a little vexed with the poet's light heart and perpetual pleasure, with the late ripeness of his sweetness, here, for their satisfaction, is a passage capable of the great age that had lately closed when Crashaw wrote. It is in his summons to nature and art:

'Come, and come strong,

To the conspiracy of our spacious song!'

I have been obliged to take courage to alter the reading of the seventeenth and nineteenth lines of the Prayer-Book, so as to make them intelligible; they had been obviously misprinted. I have also found it necessary to re-punctuate generally.

WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS.-Page 139.

This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom with it. I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas that repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious.

ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW.-Page 157.

This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that, better known, On the Death of Mr. William Harvey. In the Crashaw ode, and in the Hymn to the Light, Cowley is, at last, tender. But it cannot be said that his love-poems had tenderness. He wrote in a gay language, but added nothing to its gaiety. He wrote the language of love, and left it cooler than he found it. What the conceits of Lovelace and the rest-flagrant, not frigid-did not do was done by Cowley's quenching breath; the language of love began to lose by him. But even then, even then, who could have foretold what the loss at a later day would be!

HYMN TO THE LIGHT.-Page 159.

It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should show Cowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two lines. For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used) the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separate unit of metre. He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at least he first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroic verse; and after him

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