Chapter XII: Part THE FIFTH: CCLVIII (2)

My Arthur! whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me. 20
_Alfred Tennyson._

CCXCII

_IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE HON. EDWARD ERNEST VILLIERS._

A grace though melancholy, manly too,
Moulded his being; pensive, grave, serene,
O’er his habitual bearing and his mien
Unceasing pain, by patience tempered, threw
A shade of sweet austerity. But seen 5
In happier hours and by the friendly few,
That curtain of the spirit was withdrawn,
And fancy light and playful as a fawn,
And reason imped with inquisition keen,
Knowledge long sought with ardour ever new, 10
And wit love-kindled, showed in colours true
What genial joys with sufferings can consist;
Then did all sternness melt as melts a mist
Touched by the brightness of the golden dawn,
Aërial heights disclosing, valleys green, 15
And sunlights thrown the woodland tufts between,
And flowers and spangles of the dewy lawn.

And even the stranger, though he saw not these,
Saw what would not be willingly passed by.
In his deportment, even when cold and shy, 20
Was seen a clear collectedness and ease,
A simple grace and gentle dignity,
That failed not at the first accost to please;
And as reserve relented by degrees,
So winning was his aspect and address, 25
His smile so rich in sad felicities,
Accordant to a voice which charmed no less,
That who but saw him once remembered long,
And some in whom such images are strong
Have hoarded the impression in their heart, 30
Fancy’s fond dreams and memory’s joys among,
Like some loved relic of romantic song,
Or cherished masterpiece of ancient art.

His life was private; safely led, aloof
From the loud world,--which yet he understood 35
Largely and wisely, as no worldling could.
For he by privilege of his nature proof
Against false glitter, from beneath the roof
Of privacy, as from a cave, surveyed
With stedfast eye its flickering light and shade, 40
And gently judged for evil and for good.
But whilst he mixed not for his own behoof
In public strife, his spirit glowed with zeal,
Not shorn of action, for the public weal,--
For truth and justice as its warp and woof, 45
For freedom as its signature and seal.
His life thus sacred from the world, discharged
From vain ambition and inordinate care,
In virtue exercised, by reverence rare
Lifted, and by humility enlarged, 50
Became a temple and a place of prayer.
In latter years he walked not singly there;
For one was with him ready at all hours
His griefs, his joys, his inmost thoughts to share,
Who buoyantly his burdens helped to bear, 55
And decked his altars daily with fresh flowers.

But further may we pass not; for the ground
Is holier than the Muse herself may tread;
Nor would I it should echo to a sound
Less solemn than the service for the dead. 60
Mine is inferior matter,--my own loss,--
The loss of dear delights for ever fled,
Of reason’s converse by affection fed,
Of wisdom, counsel, solace, that across
Life’s dreariest tracts a tender radiance shed. 65
Friend of my youth! though younger, yet my guide,
How much by thy unerring insight clear
I shaped my way of life for many a year!
What thoughtful friendship on thy deathbed died!
Friend of my youth! whilst thou wast by my side 70
Autumnal days still breathed a vernal breath;
How like a charm thy life to me supplied
All waste and injury of time and tide,
How like a disenchantment was thy death!
_Henry Taylor._

CCXCIII

_FOR CHARLIE’S SAKE._

The night is late, the house is still;
The angels of the hour fulfil
Their tender ministries, and move
From couch to couch, in cares of love.
They drop into thy dreams, sweet wife, 5
The happiest smile of Charlie’s life,
And lay on baby’s lips a kiss,
Fresh from his angel-brother’s bliss;
And, as they pass, they seem to make
A strange, dim hymn, ‘For Charlie’s sake.’ 10

My listening heart takes up the strain,
And gives it to the night again,
Fitted with words of lowly praise,
And patience learned of mournful days,
And memories of the dead child’s ways. 15

His will be done, his will be done!
Who gave and took away my son,
In the ‘far land’ to shine and sing
Before the Beautiful, the King,
Who every day doth Christmas make, 20
All starred and belled for Charlie’s sake,

For Charlie’s sake I will arise;
I will anoint me where he lies,
And change my raiment, and go in
To the Lord’s house, and leave my sin 25
Without, and seat me at his board,
Eat, and be glad, and praise the Lord.
For wherefore should I fast and weep,
And sullen moods of mourning keep?
I cannot bring him back, nor he, 30
For any calling, come to me.
The bond the angel Death did sign,
God sealed--for Charlie’s sake and mine.

I’m very poor--this slender stone
Marks all the narrow field I own; 35
Yet, patient husbandman, I till,
With faith and prayers, that precious hill,
Sow it with penitential pains,
And, hopeful, wait the latter rains;
Content if, after all, the spot 40
Yield barely one forget-me-not--
Whether or figs or thistles make
My crop, content for Charlie’s sake.

I have no houses, builded well--
Only that little lonesome cell, 45
Where never romping playmates come,
Nor bashful sweethearts, cunning-dumb--
An April burst of girls and boys,
Their rainbowed cloud of glooms and joys
Born with their songs, gone with their toys; 50
Nor ever is its stillness stirred
By purr of cat, or chirp of bird,
Or mother’s twilight legend, told
Of Horner’s pie, or Tiddler’s gold,
Or fairy hobbling to the door, 55
Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor,
To bless the good child’s gracious eyes,
The good child’s wistful charities,
And crippled changeling’s hunch to make
Dance on his crutch, for good child’s sake. 60

How is it with the child? ’Tis well;
Nor would I any miracle
Might stir my sleeper’s tranquil trance,
Or plague his painless countenance:
I would not any seer might place 65
His staff on my immortal’s face,
Or lip to lip, and eye to eye,
Charm back his pale mortality.
No, Shunamite! I would not break
God’s stillness. Let them weep who wake; 70
For Charlie’s sake my lot is blest:
No comfort like his mother’s breast,
No praise like hers; no charm expressed
In fairest forms hath half her zest.
For Charlie’s sake this bird’s caressed, 75
That death left lonely in the nest;
For Charlie’s sake my heart is dressed,
As for its birthday, in its best;
For Charlie’s sake we leave the rest
To Him who gave, and who did take, 80
And saved us twice, for Charlie’s sake.
_John Williamson Palmer._

CCXCIV

_THE LEGEND OF THE STEPMOTHER._

As I lay asleep, as I lay asleep,
Under the grass as I lay so deep,
As I lay asleep in my cotton sirk
Under the shade of Our Lady’s Kirk,
I wakened up in the dead of night, 5
I wakened up in my death-sirk white,
And I heard a cry from far away,
And I knew the voice of my daughter May.
‘Mother, mother, come hither to me!
Mother, mother, come hither and see! 10
Mother, mother, mother dear,
Another mother is sitting here:
My body is bruised, and in pain I cry;
On straw in the dark afraid I lie;
I thirst and hunger for drink and meat, 15
And, mother, mother, to sleep were sweet!’
I heard the cry, though my grave was deep,
And awoke from sleep, and awoke from sleep.

I awoke from sleep, I awoke from sleep,
Up I rose from my grave so deep! 20
The earth was black, but overhead
The stars were yellow, the moon was red;
And I walked along all white and thin,
And lifted the latch and entered in,
And reached the chamber as dark as night, 25
And though it was dark, my face was white.
‘Mother, mother, I look on thee!
Mother, mother, you frighten me!
For your cheeks are thin, and your hair is gray.’
But I smiled, and kissed her fears away, 30
I smoothed her hair, and I sang a song,
And on my knee I rocked her long:
‘O mother, mother, sing low to me;
I am sleepy now, and I cannot see!’
I kissed her, but I could not weep, 35
And she went to sleep, she went to sleep.

As we lay asleep, as we lay asleep,
My May and I, in our grave so deep,
As we lay asleep in the midnight mirk,
Under the shade of Our Lady’s Kirk, 40
I wakened up in the dead of night,
Though May, my daughter, lay warm and white,
And I heard the cry of a little one,
And I knew ’twas the voice of Hugh my son.
‘Mother, mother, come hither to me! 45
Mother, mother, come hither and see!
Mother, mother, mother dear,
Another mother is sitting here:
My body is bruised and my heart is sad,
But I speak my mind and call them bad; 50
I thirst and hunger night and day,
And were I strong I would fly away!’
I heard the cry, though my grave was deep,
And awoke from sleep, and awoke from sleep.

I awoke from sleep, I awoke from sleep, 55
Up I rose from my grave so deep;
The earth was black, but overhead
The stars were yellow, the moon was red;
And I walked along all white and thin,
And lifted the latch and entered in. 60
‘Mother, mother, and art thou here?
I know your face, and I feel no fear;
Raise me, mother, and kiss my cheek,
For oh I am weary, and sore, and weak.’
I smoothed his hair with a mother’s joy, 65
And he laughed aloud, my own brave boy;
I raised and held him on my breast,
Sang him a song and bade him rest.
‘Mother, mother, sing low to me;
I am sleepy now, and I cannot see!’ 70
I kissed him, and I could not weep,
As he went to sleep, as he went to sleep.

As I lay asleep, as I lay asleep,
With my girl and boy in my grave so deep,
As I lay asleep, I awoke in fear, 75
Awoke, but awoke not my children dear,
And heard a cry so low and weak
From a tiny voice that could not speak;
I heard the cry of a little one,
My bairn that could neither talk nor run, 80
My little little one, uncaressed,
Starving for lack of the milk of the breast;
And I rose from sleep and entered in,
And found my little one pinched and thin,
And crooned a song and hushed its moan, 85
And put its lips to my white breast-bone;
And the red, red moon that lit the place
Went white to look at the little face,
And I kissed and kissed, and I could not weep,
As it went to sleep, as it went to sleep. 90

As it lay asleep, as it lay asleep,
I set it down in the darkness deep,
Smoothed its limbs and laid it out,
And drew the curtains around about;
Then into the dark, dark room I hied, 95
Where he lay awake at the woman’s side,
And, though the chamber was black as night,
He saw my face, for it was so white;
I gazed in his eyes, and he shrieked in pain,
And I knew he would never sleep again, 100
And back to my grave went silently,
And soon my baby was brought to me;
My son and daughter beside me rest,
My little baby is on my breast;
Our bed is warm, and our grave is deep, 105
But he cannot sleep, he cannot sleep!
_Robert Buchanan._

CCXCV

_THE SANDS OF DEE._

‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands of Dee;’
The western wind was wild and dank with foam, 5
And all alone went she.

The creeping tide crept up along the sand,
And o’er and o’er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see. 10
The blinding mist came down, and hid the land:
And never home came she.

‘Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair--
A tress of golden hair,
A drownèd maiden’s hair,
Above the nets at sea?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes on Dee.’

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam, 20
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea:
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.
_Charles Kingsley._

CCXCVI

_A DIRGE._

Softly! she is lying
With her lips apart:
Softly! she is dying
Of a broken heart.

Whisper! she is going 5
To her final rest:
Whisper! life is growing
Dim within her breast.

Gently! she is sleeping,
She has breathed her last: 10
Gently! while you’ are weeping,
She to Heaven has past.
_Charles Gamage Eastman._

CCXCVII

_DEATH AND LIFE._

Her sufferings ended with the day!
Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long long night away
In statuelike repose.

But when the Sun in all his state 5
Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through glory’s morning gate,
And walked in Paradise.
_James Aldrich._

CCXCVIII

_TITHONUS._

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality 5
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. 10

Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man--
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
To his great heart none other than a God!
I asked thee, ‘Give me immortality.’ 15
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
And though they could not end me, left me maimed 20
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, 25
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance 30
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, 35
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, 40
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. 45

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’

Ay me! ay me! with what another heart 50
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch--if I be he that watched--
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood 55
Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed 60
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine? 65
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die, 70
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave;
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts, 75
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
_Alfred Tennyson._

CCXCIX

_THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE._

‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean:
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more. 5

‘Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one,
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 10

‘Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 15

‘Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.’ 20
_Alfred Tennyson._

CCC

_SONNET._

Rise, said the Master, come unto the feast:
She heard the call and rose with willing feet;
But thinking it not otherwise than meet
For such a bidding to put on her best,
She is gone from us for a few short hours 5
Into her bridal closet, there to wait
For the unfolding of the palace gate,
That gives her entrance to the blissful bowers.
We have not seen her yet, though we have been
Full often to her chamber door, and oft 10
Have listened underneath the postern green,
And laid fresh flowers, and whispered short and soft;
But she hath made no answer, and the day
From the clear west is fading fast away.
_Henry Alford._

CCCI

_THE VOICELESS._

We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,
But o’er their silent sister’s breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string, 5
And noisy fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone,
Whose song has told their hearts’ sad story: 10
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep 15
On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break, and give no sign,
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine,
Slow-dropped from misery’s crushing presses! 20
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!
_Oliver Wendell Holmes._

CCCII

_A THANKSGIVING._

Lord, in this dust thy sovereign voice
First quickened love divine;
I am all thine--thy care and choice,
My very praise is thine.

I praise Thee, while thy providence 5
In childhood frail I trace,
For blessings given, ere dawning sense
Could seek or scan thy grace;

Blessings in boyhood’s marvelling hour,
Bright dreams and fancyings strange; 10
Blessings, when reason’s awful power
Gave thought a bolder range;

Blessings of friends, which to my door
Unasked, unhoped, have come;
And choicer still, a countless store 15
Of eager smiles at home.

Yet, Lord, in memory’s fondest place
I shrine those seasons sad,
When looking up, I saw thy face
In kind austereness clad. 20

I would not miss one sigh or tear,
Heart-pang or throbbing brow;
Sweet was the chastisement severe,
And sweet its memory now.

Yes! let the fragrant scars abide, 25
Love-tokens in thy stead,
Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side,
And thorn-encompassed head.

And such thy tender force be still,
When self would swerve or stray, 30
Shaping to truth the froward will
Along thy narrow way.

Deny me wealth; far, far remove
The lure of power or name;
Hope thrives in straits, in weakness love, 35
And faith in this world’s shame.
_John Henry Newman._

CCCIII

_THE GRAVE._

I stood within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretched its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strained eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.

Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray, 5
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in the encountering darkness passed away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom; 10
And feebly burning ’gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.

Around me stretched the slumbers of the dead,
Whereof the silence ached upon mine ear;
More and more noiseless did I make my tread, 15
And yet its echoes chilled my heart with fear.

The former men of every age and place,
From all their wanderings gathered; round me lay;
The dust of withered empires did I trace,
And stood ’mid generations past away. 20

I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire,
Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath;
Whole armies whom a day beheld expire,
By thousands swept into the arms of Death.

I saw the old world’s white and wave-swept bones, 25
A giant heap of creatures that had been;
Far and confused the broken skeletons
Lay strewn beyond mine eye’s remotest ken.

Death’s various shrines--the Urn, the Stone, the Lamp--
Were scattered round, confused, amid the dead; 30
Symbols and Types were mouldering in the damp,
Their shapes were waning, and their meaning fled.

Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe,
Were charactered on tablets Time had swept;
And deep were half their letters hid below 35
The thick small dust of those they once had wept.

No hand was here to wipe the dust away;
No reader of the writing traced beneath;
No spirit sitting by its form of clay;
Nor sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death. 40

One place alone had ceased to hold its prey;
A form had pressed it and was there no more;
The garments of the Grave beside it lay,
Where once they wrapped Him on the rocky floor.

He only with returning footsteps broke 45
The eternal calm wherewith the Tomb was bound;
Among the sleeping Dead alone He woke,
And blessed with outstretched hands the host around.

Well is it that such blessing hovers here,
To soothe each sad survivor of the throng 50
Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere,
And pour their woe the loaded air along.

They to the verge have followed that they love,
And on the insuperable threshold stand;
With cherished names its speechless calm reprove, 55
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasped hand.

But vainly there the mourners seek relief
From silenced voice, and shapes, Decay has swept,
Till Death himself shall medicine their grief,
Closing their eyes by those o’er whom they wept. 60

All that have died, the Earth’s whole race, repose,
Where Death collects his treasures, heap on heap;
O’er each one’s busy day the nightshades close;
Its Actors, Sufferers, Schools, Kings, Armies--sleep.

‘_V._’

CCCIV

_MY PSALM._

I mourn no more my vanished years:
Beneath a tender rain,
An April rain of smiles and tears,
My heart is young again.

The west winds blow, and singing low, 5
I hear the glad streams run;
The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.

No longer forward, nor behind,
I look in hope and fear: 10
But grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now, and here.

I plough no more a desert land
For harvest, weed and tare;
The manna dropping from God’s hand 15
Rebukes my painful care.

I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at my door. 20

The airs of spring may never play
Among the ripening corn,
Nor freshness of the flowers of May
Blow through the autumn morn;

Yet shall the blue-eyed gentian look 25
Through fringèd lids to heaven,
And the pale aster in the brook
Shall see its image given;

The woods shall wear their robes of praise,
The south-wind softly sigh, 30
And sweet calm days in golden haze
Melt down the amber sky.

Not less shall manly deed and word
Rebuke an age of wrong:
The graven flowers that wreathe the sword 35
Make not the blade less strong.

Enough that blessings undeserved
Have marked my erring track,
That wheresoe’er my feet have swerved,
His chastening turned me back; 40

That more and more a Providence
Of love is understood,
Making the springs of time and sense
Sweet with eternal good;

That death seems but a covered way, 45
Which opens into light,
Wherein no blinded child can stray
Beyond the Father’s sight;

That care and trial seem at last,
Through memory’s sunset air, 50
Like mountain ranges overpast
In purple distance fair;

That all the jarring notes of life
Seem blending in a psalm,
And all the angles of its strife 55
Slow rounding into calm.

And so the shadows fall apart,
And so the west winds play:
And all the windows of my heart
I open to this day. 60
_John Greenleaf Whittier._

NOTES.

P. 3, No. iii.--There seems no reason to doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh was the author of this poem, and that the initials W. R. with which it appears in Davison’s _Rhapsody_ indicate truly the authorship. It is abundantly worthy of him; there have been seldom profounder thoughts more perfectly expressed than in the fourth and fifth stanzas. A certain obscurity in the poem will demand, but will also repay, study; and for its right understanding we must keep in mind that ‘affection’ is here used as in our English Bible, where it is the rendering of πἁθος (Rom. i. 26; Col. 3, 5), and that ‘affection’ and ‘desire’ are regarded as interchangeable and equivalent.

P. 4, No. iv.--See Spedding’s _Works of Lord Bacon_, vol. vii. p. 267 sqq., for the external evidence making it reasonably probable, but certainly not lifting above all doubt, that the ascription of these lines to Lord Bacon is a right one.

P. 6, No. vi.--This very remarkable poem first appeared in the second edition of Davison’s _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1608; itself a sufficient disproof of the often-repeated assertion that Raleigh wrote it the night before his execution, 1618. At the same time this leaves untouched the question whether he may not at some earlier day have been its author. There is a certain amount of evidence in favour of this tradition, which is carefully put together in Hannah’s _Poems by Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others_, 1845, pp. 89-98.

P. 10, No. viii.--The author of these beautiful lines was a minister of the Scotch Kirk at the close of the sixteenth century. Several stanzas have been omitted.

P. 21, No. xviii.--This sonnet is the first among the commendatory poems prefixed to the original edition of _The Fairy Queen_. As original in conception as it is grand in execution, it is about the finest compliment which was ever paid by poet to poet, such as it became Raleigh to indite and Spenser to receive. Yet it labours under a serious defect. The great poets of the past lose no whit of their glory because later poets are found worthy to share it. Petrarch in his lesser, and Homer in his greater sphere, are just as illustrious since Spenser appeared as before.

P. 23, No. xx.--I have marked this poem as anonymous, the evidence which ascribes it to Sir Walter Raleigh being insufficient to prove him the author of it. It first appeared in _England’s Helicon_, 1600. In all known copies of this edition ‘Ignoto’ has been pasted over W. R., the original signature which the poem bore. This may have arisen from a discovery on the part of the editor that the poem was not Raleigh’s; but also may be explained by his unwillingness to have his authorship of it declared; so that there is here nothing decisive one way or the other. Other external evidence bearing on the question I believe there is none, except Izaak Walton’s assertion fifty-three years later (_Complete Angler_, 1653, p. 64) that it ‘was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.’ No doubt then there was a tradition to this effect; though ‘younger’ must not be pushed too far, as Raleigh was ten years older than Marlowe, to whose poem this is a reply. All that we can say is that there is no name in English literature so great, but that the authorship of these lines, if this could be ascertained, would be an additional honour to it.--l. 21-24: In the _second_ edition of Walton’s _Complete Angler_, 1655, this stanza appears--I should say, for the first time, were not this fact brought into question by its nearly contemporaneous appearance in a broad-sheet (see _Roxburgh Ballads_, vol. i. p. 205) which seems by its type to belong, as those expert in such matters affirm, to the date 1650-55. The stanza there runs,

‘What should you talk of dainties then!
Of better meat than serveth men?
All that is vain; this only good,
Which God doth bless and send for food.’

While Walton may have made, it is also possible that he may have found ready made to his hand, this beautiful addition to the poem.

P. 24, No. xxii.--Of this poem Dr. Guest (_History of English Rhythms_, vol. ii. p. 273) has said, ‘It appears to me extremely beautiful,’ a judgment from which none who are capable of recognizing poetry when they see it will dissent. It is found in Campion’s _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, London, 1602. The purpose of the book is mainly to prove that rhyme is altogether an unnecessary appendage to English verse; that this does not require, and indeed is better without it. Had he offered to his readers many lyrics like this, he might have done much more than by all his arguments he has done to bring them to his opinion. As it is, the main value which the _Observations_ possess consists in this exquisite lyric, and, mediately, in the admirable _Apology for Rhyme_ on Daniel’s part which they called out.

Pp. 27, 28, No. xxv. xxvi.--Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets may be ‘vain and amatorious,’ as Milton has called his prose romance of _The Arcadia_; but they possess grace, fancy, and a passion which makes itself felt even under the artificial forms of a Platonic philosophy. They are addressed to one, who, if the course of true love had run smooth, should have been his wife. When, however, through the misunderstanding of parents, or through some other cause, she had become the wife of another, Platonic as they are, they would far better have remained unwritten.

P. 35, No. xli.--Pope somewhere speaks of ‘a very mediocre poet, one Drayton,’ and it will be remembered that when Goldsmith visited Poets’ Corner, seeing his monument he exclaimed, ‘Drayton, I never heard of him before.’ It must be confessed that Drayton, who wrote far too much, wrote often below himself, and has left not a little to justify the censure of the one, and to excuse the ignorance of the other. At the same time only a poet could describe the sun at his rising,

‘With rosy robes and crown of flaming gold;’

and this heroic ballad has a very genuine and martial tone about it. It is true that every celebration of Agincourt must show pale and faint beside Shakespeare’s epic drama, _Henry the Fifth_, and this will as little endure as any other to be brought even into remote comparison with that; but for all this it ought not to be forgotten.

P. 39, No. xlii. l. 9: ‘Clarius,’ a surname of Apollo, derived from his famous temple at Claros, in Asia Minor.--l. 27-30: Prometheus was ‘Japhet’s line,’ being the son of Iapetus, whom Jonson has not resisted the temptation of identifying, as others have done, with Japhet the son of Noah, and calling by his name. According to one legend it was by the assistance of Minerva, ‘the issue of Jove’s brain,’ that Prometheus ascended to heaven, and there stole from the chariot of the Sun the fire which he brought down to earth; to all which there is reference here.

P. 40, No. xliii.--It would be difficult not to think that we had here the undeveloped germ of _Il Penseroso_ of Milton, if this were not shown to be impossible by the fact that Milton’s poem was published two years previously to this.

P. 41, No. xliv.--Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so, yet taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this and No. 1. of this collection, poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised _more_ than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though possibly the creed which he professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the Sovereign and the life of the State must altogether fail to justify or excuse.

P. 44, No. xlvi.--The judgment of one great poet on another his contemporary, must always have a true interest for us, and it was with serious regret that I omitted Ben Jonson’s ever-memorable lines on Shakespeare. Many things a contemporary sees, as none who belong to a later time can see them; knows, as none other can know; and even where he does not tell us much which we greatly care to learn about the other, he is sure to tell us something, whether he means it or not, about himself and about his age. English literature possesses many judgments of this kind. What Ben Jonson did for Shakespeare, Cartwright, a strong-thoughted writer if not an eminent poet, and more briefly Cleveland here, have done in turn for Jonson; Denham for Cowley; Cowley for Crashaw; Carew for Donne; Marvell for Milton; Dryden for Oldham. There is not one of these which may not be read with profit by the careful student of English literature; and certainly Cleveland must be allowed very happily to have seized here some of the main excellences of Jonson.

P. 45, No. xlvii.--Another poem on the same subject, in Byrd’s _Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs_, is as a whole inferior to this, but yields one stanza which is equal in merit to any here:

‘I wish but what I have at will;
I wander not to seek for more;
I like the plain; I climb no hill;
In greatest storms I sit on shore;
And laugh at them that toil in vain
To get what must be lost again.’

P. 46, No. xlix.--Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so heavily laden with meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures of thought and feeling which they contain. It is eminently so with this one. The subject, the bitter delusion of all sinful pleasures, the reaction of a swift remorse which inevitably dogs them, Shakespeare must have most deeply felt, as he has expressed himself upon it most profoundly. I know no picture of this at all so terrible in its truth as in _The Rape of Lucrece_ the description of Tarquin after he has successfully wrought his deed of shame. But this sonnet on the same theme is worthy to stand by its side.

P. 48, No. lii.--These lines are appended to the second edition of Wastell’s _Microbiblion_, 1629; they are not found in the first, published under another title in 1623. I have not disturbed the ascription of them to him, although, considering the general worthlessness of the book, it must be considered very doubtful indeed. On the question of the authorship of these lines see Hannah, _Poems and Psalms of Henry King_, 1843, p. cxviii.

P. 57, No. lxii.--There are at least half-a-dozen texts of this poem with an infinite variety of readings, these being particularly numerous in the third stanza, which I must needs think corrupt as it now stands. The _Reliquiæ Wottonianæ_, in which it was first published, appeared in 1651, some twelve years after Wotton’s death; but much earlier MS. copies are in existence; thus one in the handwriting of Edward Alleyn, apparently of date 1616. Ben Jonson visited Drummond of Hawthornden two or three years later, and is reported by him to have had these lines by heart.

P. 58, No. lxiii.--This poem Bishop Percy believes to have been first printed in a volume of _Miscellaneous Poems by different hands_, published by David Lewis, 1726. The date and authorship is discussed on several occasions in _Notes and Queries_, vol. iii. (1st Series) pp. 27, 108, 155, but without much light being thrown upon either.

P. 60, No. lxv.--Carew is commonly grouped with Waller, and subordinated to him. He is indeed immensely his superior. Waller never wrote a love-song in grace and fancy to compare with this; while in many of Carew’s lighter pieces there is an underlying vein of earnestness, which is wholly wanting in the other.

P. 62, No. lxviii.--Waller’s fame has sadly, but not undeservedly, declined since the time when it used to be taken for granted that he had virtually invented English poetry, or one might almost say, the English language; since an editor of his poems (1690) could write that his was ‘a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful in poetry. He was indeed the parent of English verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. The tongue came into his hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first, and to that degree that all artists since him have admired the workmanship without pretending to mend it.’ Compare the twenty-two lines devoted to him in Addison’s _Account of the greatest English Poets_, which includes Congreve, but not Shakespeare! For myself, I confess that I did not find it very easy to select from the whole range of his poems one which I much cared to quote. He appears in this to have had in his eye the graceful epigram of Rufinus beginning,

Πἑμπω σοι, Ρυδὁκλεια, τὁδε στἑφος,

and ending with these lines,

ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα,
ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος.

P. 63, No. lxx.--Castara, to whom these beautiful lines are addressed, was a daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Percy, and either was already, or afterwards became, the wife of the poet. There are no purer and few more graceful records of a noble attachment than that which is contained in the poems to which Habington has given the name of the lady of his happy love. Phillips, writing in 1675, says, ‘His poems are now almost forgotten.’ How little they deserved this, how finished at times his versification was, lines such as the following--they are the first stanza of a poem for which I could not find room--will abundantly prove. It is headed, _Against them who lay Unchastity to the sex of Women_.

‘They meet with but unwholesome springs,
And summers which infectious are,
They hear but when the mermaid sings,
And only see the falling star,
Who ever dare
Affirm no woman chaste and fair.’

P. 76, No. lxxviii.--Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all:

‘Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.’

They are so far beyond all doubt the greatest in the language that it is a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow is that ‘three of them are not bad;’ and he and Hannah More once set themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains an illustration lively enough to be worth quoting: ‘Why, Madam,’ he said, ‘Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.’

P. 76, No. lxxix.--I have obtained room for these lines by excluding another very beautiful poem by the same author, his _Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda_. To this I was moved in part by the fact that the _Song_ has found its way into many modern collections; these lines, so far as I know, into none; in part by my conviction that we have here a poem which, though less popular than the _Song_, is of a still higher mood. If after this praise, these lines should, at the first perusal, disappoint a thoughtful reader, I would ask him to read them a second time, and, if needful, a third. Sooner or later they will reveal the depth and riches of meaning which under their unpretending forms lie concealed.

P. 78, No. lxxx.--This poem will acquire a profound interest, for those at least who count there is something better in the world than Art, when we read it in the light of the fact mentioned by Lord Clarendon in his _History of the Rebellion_ about its author, namely, that ‘after fifty years spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and the greatest manifestations of Christianity that his best friends could desire;’ so that in the end the hope which he ventures here timidly to utter was fulfilled, and one thorn ‘from the dry leafless trunk on Golgotha’ did prove to him more precious ‘than all the flourishing wreaths by laureates worn.’

P. 82, No. lxxxiv., l. 8: Campbell has transferred ‘the world’s gray fathers’ into his poem on the Rainbow; but has no more to say for the author of these exquisite lines and of three other poems as perfect in form as in spirit which enrich this volume than this, ‘He is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit, but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amid his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.’

P. 83, No. lxxxv. l. 133, 134: These lines are very perplexing. Milton’s lines on Shakespeare abundantly attest that the true character of the greatness of England’s greatest poet rose distinct and clear before the mind of him who in greatness approached him the nearest. But in this couplet can we trace any sense of the same discernment? ‘Fancy’s child’ may pass, seeing that ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were not effectually desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay, ‘fancy’ was for him the greater name (see _Paradise Lost_, v. 100-113). ‘Sweetest’ Shakespeare undoubtedly was, but then the sweetness is so drawn up into the power, that this is about the last epithet one would be disposed to use about him. And then what could Milton possibly have intended by ‘his native woodnotes wild’--the sort of praise which might be bestowed, though with no eminent fulness, upon Clare, or a poet of his rank. The _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and _As You Like It_ are perhaps the most idyllic of his plays; but the perfect art controlling at every step the prodigality of nature, in these as in all his works, takes away all fitness from language such as this, and I can only wonder that of all the commentators on Milton not one has cared to explain to us what the poet here meant.

P. 87, No. lxxxvi. l. 18: Memnon, king of Ethiopia (nigri Memnonis arma, Virgil), who according to the cyclic poets was slain before the walls of Troy by Achilles, is described in the _Odyssey_, xi. 522, as the most beautiful of the warriors there. A sister of his might therefore be presumed to be beautiful no less. Milton did not, as some say, invent the sister. Mention is made of her, her name is Hemera (Ήμἑρα), in Dictys Cretensis. It is she who pays the last honours to the ashes of her brother.--l. 19: Cassiopeia, ‘starred’ as having been translated into the heaven, and become a constellation there. She offended the Nereids by contesting the prize of beauty with them. Milton concludes that as an Ethiopian she was black, but this is nowhere said.--l. 108-115: Milton does not introduce Chaucer in his _Allegro_, but in his _Penseroso_; seeing in him something beside ‘the merry bard,’ which is all that Addison can see in the most pathetic poet in the English language.--l. 116-120: Spenser is here alluded to, of course--‘our sage and serious poet, Spenser,’ as Milton loved to call him. Contrast his judgment of Spenser’s allegory, as being something

‘Where more is meant than meets the ear;’

with Addison’s,

‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.’

P. 92, No. lxxvii.--Wordsworth in the Preface to an early edition of his works calls attention to Cotton’s well-nigh forgotten poetry, some of it abundantly deserving the oblivion into which it has fallen, but some of a very rare excellence in its kind. This he does, quoting largely from his _Ode to Winter_, mainly with the purpose of illustrating the distinction between fancy, of which these poems, in his judgment, have much, and imagination, of which they have little or none. They have a merit which certainly strikes me more than any singular wealth of fancy which I can find in them; and which to Wordsworth also must have constituted their chief attraction, namely, the admirable English in which they are written. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes blemished by more serious faults; but for homely vigour and purity of language, for the total absence of any attempt to conceal the deficiency of strong and high imagination by a false poetic diction--purple rags torn from other men’s garments, and sewn upon his own--he may take his place among the foremost masters of the tongue. Coleridge has said as much (_Biographia Literaria_, vol. ii. p. 96): ‘There are not a few poems in that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.’ I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several stanzas toward the close have been omitted.

P. 95, No. lxxxviii.--Johnson has justly praised the ‘unequalled fertility of invention’ displayed in this poem, and in its pendant, _Against Hope_. To estimate _all_ the wonder of them, they should be read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched criticism, which Addison has called _An Account of the greatest English Poets_, there is one exception to the shallowness or falseness of most of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem exemplifies. These are the first six lines:

‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,
O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;
His turns too closely on the reader press,
He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;
One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes
With silent wonder but new wonders rise.’

P. 96, No. lxxxix.--It is evident that in this Prologue and in that which follows Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, and there is an eminent appropriateness to the time and place in them all. Though no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably surpassed them all.

P. 99, No. xci.--Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of Juvenal, published in 1661 his _Survey of the World_, which contains a thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample. Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point--to my mind the distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been more happily drawn--and some of them have poetry as well. Yet for all this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,

‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give
Life, say to these my meditations, Live,’

has not been, and will scarcely now, be fulfilled.

P. 103, No. xcv.--This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the title _Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford_. Two copies, of different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in the British Museum, while in _The Topographer_, vol. ii. p. 234, there is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another, whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme, bearing the title, _The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of Strafford_, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:

‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blind
By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;
And having raised him to his height of cares,
Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;
How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,
Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’

P. 108, No. xcix.--These spirited lines were found written in an old hand in a copy of Lovelace’s _Lucasta_, 1679. We have in them no doubt a Cavalier Song of our Civil Wars.

P. 108, No. c.--Davenant is scarcely known except by his strong-thoughted but heavy poem of _Gondibert_; and very little known, I should suppose, by this. But three of his poems, this and Nos. cvii. and clii., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half earnest, few have surpassed him. I know nothing in its kind happier than clii., which by an oversight has been placed somewhat too late in this volume.

P. 111, No. ci. l. 43-48: Cicero (_De Nat. Deor._ 3, 28, and elsewhere) refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræe, whom one would have stabbed, but did in fact only open a dangerous ulcer in his body.--l. 59: ‘Adamant’ is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in Shakespeare’s _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, 2, i.

‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
And yet you draw not iron.’