Dryden took possession and then Pope. But both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in the French manner, divided. Cowley, however, with admirable art, is able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of his line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any lingering. Take this one instance

'Like some fair pine o'erlooking all the ignobler wood.'

If Cowley's delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and he surely had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrine would have taken its own place as an important line of English metre, more mobile than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramatic poetry, but a line liberally lyrical. It would have been the light, pursuing wave that runs suddenly, outrunning twenty, further up the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longer impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in this a valuable bequest.

Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard Crashaw, and the alexandrine is to be found-to be found by searching-in Crashaw; and he took precisely the same care as Cowley that the long wand of that line should not give way in the middleshould be strong and supple and should last. Here are four of his alexandrines

'Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise.'

'Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more.'

'And everlasting series of a deathless song.'

'To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name.'

A later poet-Coventry Patmore-wrote a far longer line than even these-a line not only speeding further, but speeding with a more celestial movement than Cowley or Crashaw heard with the ear of dreams.

'He unhappily adopted,' says Dr. Johnson as to Cowley's diction, 'that which was predominant.' 'That which was predominant' was as good a vintage of English language as the cycles of history have ever brought to pass.

TO LUCASTA.-Page 163.

Colonel Richard Lovelace, an enchanting poet, is hardly read, except for two poems which are as famous as any in our language. Perhaps the rumour of his conceits has frightened his reader. It must be granted they are now and then daunting; there is a poem on 'Princess Louisa Drawing' which is a very maze; the little paths of verse and fancy turn in upon one another, and the turns are

pointed with artificial shouts of joy and surprise. But, again, what a reader unused to a certain living symbolism will be apt to take for a careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a rapture-none graver, none more fiery or more luminous. But even to name the poem where these occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry over to the general sense of humour, which one distrusts. Nor is Lovelace easy reading at any time (the two or three famous poems excepted). The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the fiddler. Eleven o'clock in the morning was as good an hour as another for a dance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate with figures. It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of the movement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a free impulse. Since the first day danced with the first night, no dancing was more naturalat least to a dancer of genius. True, the dance could be tyrannous. It was an importunate fashion. When the Bishop of Hereford, compelled by Robin Hood, in merry Barnsdale, danced in his boots (‘and glad he could so get away '), he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a seventeenth century author here and there whose original seriousness or work-a-day piety would have been content to go plodding flatfoot or halting, as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune, the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetual measure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest his wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flight has lost its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant urchins-naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth century was in love with that old fancy-more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past. Its late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up.

Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace's poetry:

"This is the palace of the wood,

And court o' the royal oak, where stood
The whole nobility.'

In more than one place Lucasta's, or Amarantha's, or Laura's hair is sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in Wordsworth's line.

Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow a book; yet it is but a hermitage.' To shake out the light and spirit of its leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him, but to the world.

In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, 'you' to 'thou.' Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and the inconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else so distressing as in this brief and otherwise perfect poem. The fault is easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lend him this redress, offered him here as an act of comradeship.

LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES.-Page 165.

That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend upon the precision of a comma-nay, upon the precision of the voice in reading. Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem that makes a kind of dainty confusion between the two vestals-the living and the dead; they are ‘equal virgins,' and you must assign the pronouns carefully to either as you read. This, read twice, must surely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings. It is a joy to meet such a phrase as 'her brave eyes.'

To ALTHEA, FROM PRISON.-Page 166.

This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight. Should they be 'birds' or 'gods' that wanton in the air in the first of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at 'gods,' and with admirable judgment suggested 'birds,' an amendment adopted by the greater number of succeeding editors, until one or two wished for the other phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace. But the Bishop's misgiving was after all justified by one of the Mss. of the poem, in which the 'gods' proved to be 'birds' long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with 'gods' would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace led from birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels.

'When linnet-like confined' is another modern reading. 'When, like committed linnets,' daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored; happily, because Lovelace would not have the word 'confined' twice in this little poem.

A HORATIAN ODE.-Page 169.

'He earned the glorious name,' says a biographer of Andrew Marvell (editing an issue of that poet's works which certainly has its faults), 'of the British Aristides.' The portly dulness of the mind that could make such a phrase, and having made, award it, is not, in fairness, to affect a reader's thought of Marvell himself nor even of his time. Under correction, I should think that the award was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve of the day that cumbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burden and made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell's political rectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a robustious kind; but his poetry, at its rare best, has a 'wild civility,' which might puzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success of this phrase of the 'British Aristides.' Nay, it is difficult not to think that Marvell too, who was 'of middling stature, roundish-faced, cherry-cheeked,' a healthy and active rather than a spiritual Aristides, might himself

have been somewhat taken by surprise at the encounters of so subtle a muse. He, as a garden-poet, expected the accustomed Muse to lurk about the fountain-heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the statues of the gods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century convention in which there were certainly no surprises. And for fear of the commonplaces of those visits, Marvell sometimes outdoes the whole company of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy. The reader treads with him a 'maze' most resolutely intricate, and is more than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzled on the way to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought.

And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardly looked for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had been waiting behind a laurel or an apple-tree. You find him coming away from such a divine ambush a wilder and a simpler man. All his garden had been made ready for poetry, and poetry was indeed there, but in unexpected hiding and in a strange form, looking rather like a fugitive, shy of the poet who was conscious of having her rules by heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen, for all her haste.

The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of a different character and a higher degree. They have so much authentic dignity that 'the glorious name of the British Aristides' really seems duller when it is conferred as the earnings of the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland than when it inappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell, cherry-cheeked, caught in the tendrils of his vines and melons. He shall be, therefore, the British Aristides in those moments of midsummer solitude; at least, the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never sought.

The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinate length. The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes the utmost of the fun to be easily found in the physical facts of the country whose people with mad labour fished the land to shore.' The Satire on 'Flecno' makes the utmost of another joke we know of-that of famine. Flecno, it will be remembered, was a poet, and poor; but the joke of his bad verses was hardly needed, so fine does Marvell find that of his hunger. Perhaps there is no age of English satire that does not give forth the sound of that laughter unknown to savages-that craven laughter.

THE PICTURE OF T. C. IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS.-Page 173.

The presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the sure sign of the visit of that unlooked-for muse. With all spirit and subtlety does Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T. C. (the future 'virtuous enemy of man') the prophetic homage of the habitual poets. The poem closes with an impassioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in Marvell.

THE DEFINITION OF LOVE.-Page 179.

The noble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, high or low, throughout Marvell's book, if we except one single splendid and surpassing passage from The Definition of Love

'Magnanimous despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing.

CHILDHOOD.-Page 183.

One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the full spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but students until Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition. The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw's lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life. Vaughan's imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than a century-and such a century!-from him to Wordsworth. The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray-of the world, the world, whether reasonable or flippant or rhetorical-is more strange. Vaughan's phrase and diction seem to carry the light. Il vous semble que cette femme dégage de la lumière en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in Les Misérables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of light that we know the muse we are to love.

SCOTTISH BALLADS.-Page 191.

It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had passages of genius-a line here and there of surpassing imagination and poetry-rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind. 'None but my foe to be my guide' so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher's Well; its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken by Margaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret; and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as that beginning, 'I saw the new moon late yestreen,' the stanza beginning ‘O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords,' and almost all the stanzas following. A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing quality throughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson's version of Fair Annie, for Edom o' Gordon, for The Dæmon Lover, for Edward, Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.