Chapter XIII: Part THE FIFTH: CCLVIII (3)

P. 112, No. cii.--I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to do. Few, I think, will agree with Horace Walpole that ‘the poetry is most uncouth and inharmonious;’ so far from this, it has a very solemn and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives them in his _Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton_, saying, ‘A very worthy gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original, who avoucheth them to be a true copy.’--l. 2: A word has evidently dropped out here, which is manifestly wanted by the metre, and, as it seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the ‘earthly’ with which I have ventured to supply the want.

P. 113, No. ciii.--Marvell showed how well he understood what he was giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it ‘Horatian.’ In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best, attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could from any other poem in the language be obtained.

P. 117, No. cv.--I have taken the liberty of omitting nine out of the twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley’s; still less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole, which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any which remain, from his _Elegy_; which led Milton to omit from the Spirit’s _Prologue_ in _Comus_ sixteen glorious lines which may still be seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in the notes to later editions of his Poems.--l. 45-56: Johnson has said, urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, ‘if Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.’ Let Dryden have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as satisfying to the ear as to the mind.--l. 68: This line is certainly perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined it runs thus,

‘Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.’

In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed,

‘Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.’

The line seems in neither shape to yield any tolerable sense--not in the first, with ‘Light’ regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second, which only acquires some sort of meaning when ‘colours’ is treated as a genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am so little satisfied with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it.

P. 120, No. cvi.--Hallam has said that ‘Cowley upon the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,’ adding, however, that ‘some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.’ This may have been so, but a man’s contemporaries have some opportunities of judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not only by what he _does_, but by what he _is_; and oftentimes a man _is_ more than he _does_; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come in actual contact with him which is only inadequately justified by aught which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many a man’s embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some men’s, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question Mr. Hallam’s assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of imagination, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham, the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will show:

‘Old mother Wit and Nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;
In Spenser and in Jonson Art
Of slower Nature got the start;
But both in him so equal are,
None knows which bears the happiest share.
To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he wrote was all his own,
He melted not the ancient gold,
Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold
To plunder all the Roman stores
Of poets and of orators.
Horace’s wit and Virgil’s state
He did not steal but emulate!
And when he would like them appear,
Their garb, but not their clothes did wear.’

l. 19-40: Compare with these the lines, inferior indeed, but themselves remarkable, and showing how strongly Cowley felt on this matter, which occur in his _Ode to Dr. Harvey_, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood:

‘Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth’s own book,
The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,
And wisely thought ’twas fit
Not to read comments only upon it,
But on the original itself to look.
Methinks in art’s great circle others stand,
Locked up together, hand in hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
And dance like fairies a fantastic round,
But neither change their motion nor their ground.’

The same thought reappears, and again remarkably expressed, although under quite different images, in his _Ode to Mr. Hobbs_. These are a few lines:

‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,
Old rubbish we remove.
To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,
And with fond divining wands
We search among the dead
For treasure burièd,
Whilst still the liberal earth does hold
So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’

Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it:

‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite,
And made his torch their universal light.
So truth, while only one supplied the State,
Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;
Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms,
Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’

l. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first prefixed to Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society of London_, London, 1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley’s death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley’s statement here. The position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise the encomium on Sprat’s _History_ might seem dragged in with no sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who know Addison’s ‘tuneful prelate’ only by his verse might suppose. The book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after l. 143, three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They are as follows:

‘She with much stranger art than his that put
All the Iliads in a nut,
The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’

P. 129, No. cix.--This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from the _Thyestes_ of Seneca, beginning

Me dulcis saturet quies,

and ending with these remarkable lines,

Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi,

seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale, prefixed to one of his _Contemplations_, there is a translation by Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the concluding lines:

‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,
Into his own heart never pries,
Death’s to him a strange surprise.’

P. 130, No. cx.--I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (‘a most profuse pourer forth of English rhyme’ Phillips calls him) was indeed so intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and sometimes showed that he possessed.

P. 131, No. cxii.--When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles ‘the darling of our plebeian judgments,’ he intimates the circle in which his popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been hailed as

‘that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,’

became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far better right than his despisers.--l. 25: ‘To vie’ is to put down a certain sum upon a card; ‘to revie’ is to cover this with a larger, by which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.

P. 132, No. cxiii.--Milton’s lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting epitaph in the English language. Of Pope’s there is not one which deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning the departed besides those which are dealt with here.--This epitaph contains two fine allusions to Virgil’s _Æneid_, with which Dryden was of necessity so familiar. The first, that of l. 7-10 to book v. l. 327-338. At the games with which Æneas celebrates his father’s funeral, Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. l. 860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family and of the Roman people perished.

P. 133, No. cxiv.--Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, ‘by him who says what he saw’--for this is the attestation to the truth of all that it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.

P. 136, No. cxix.--The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris’s _Voyages_, vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast had arrived--but he shall speak his own words:--‘and now the sun was set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion.’ To me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.

P. 137, No. cxxi.--A few lines from this exquisite monody have found their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in Headley’s _Select Beauties_, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has called _The Surrender_, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume. Henry King’s _Poems_ have been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah, London, 1843.

P. 141, No. cxxiii.--A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeed almost all Donne’s poetry is imperfect in form and workmanship; but it is the genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles, wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all. There is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual life, which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that, noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the language of Carew, one of his contemporaries,

‘A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,’

he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered, and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had victoriously struggled.

P. 142, No. cxxv.--There is a certain residue of truth in Johnson’s complaint of the blending of incongruous theologies, or rather of a mythology and a theology, in this poem--Neptune and Phœbus and Panope and the Fury mixed up with St. Peter and a greater than St. Peter, and a fierce assault on the Clergy of the Church. At the same time there is a fusing power in the imagination, when it is in its highest exercise, which can bring together and chemically unite materials the most heterogeneous; and the fault of Johnson’s criticism is that he has no eye for the mighty force of this which in _Lycidas_ is displayed, and which has brought all or nearly all of its strange assemblage of materials into harmonious unity--and even where this is not so, hardly allows us to remember the fact, so wondrous is the beauty and splendour of the whole. But in weaker hands the bringing together of all which is here brought together, and the attempt to combine it all in one poem, would have inevitably issued in failure the most ridiculous.--l. 32-49: This and more than one other allusion in this poem implies that King wrote verses, and of an idyllic character, as would seem. In his brother’s Elegy, contained in the same volume in which _Lycidas_ first appeared, as much, and indeed a good deal more is said:

‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attire
That e’er they wore.’

If he wrote English verse, and it is difficult to give any other meaning to these lines, none of it has reached us. A few pieces of Latin poetry bearing his name are scattered through the volumes of encomiastic verse which were issued from Cambridge during the time that he, as Fellow and Tutor of Christ’s, was connected with it. They are only of average merit.--l. 50: A glorious appropriation of Virgil, _Buc_. x. 9, 10,

‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ
Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’

l. 132: Observe the exquisite art with which Milton manages the transition from the Christian to the heathen. He assumes that Alpheus and the Sicilian Muse had shrunk away ashamed while St. Peter was speaking. In bidding them now to return, he implies that he is coming down from the spiritual heights to which for a while he had been lifted up, and entering the region of pastoral poetry once more.--l. 159-164: These lines were for a long time very obscure. Dr. Todd in his learned notes, to which I must refer, has done much to dissipate the obscurity, though I cannot think all is clear even now.

P. 148, No. cxxvi.--These lines are the short answer to a very long question, or series of questions, which Davenant has called _The Philosopher’s Disquisition directed to the dying Christian_. This poem, than which I know few weightier with thought, unfortunately extends to nearly four hundred lines--its length, and the fact that it appeals but to a limited circle of readers, precluding me from finding room for more than a brief extract from it, and that in this note; but it literally abounds with lines notable as the following:

‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,
That wears out Truth’s best stories into tales.’

I am well aware of the evil report under which Davenant labours, and there are passages in his poems which seem to bear it out, as for example this, which appears to call into question the resurrection:

‘But ask not bodies doomed to die,
To what abode they go:
Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,
It is not safe to know.’

At the same time ‘the Philosopher’ here does not so much deny that there is any truth for man as that he has any organ whereby, of himself, he may attain this truth. The poem--it is the dying Christian who is addressed--opens thus:

‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,
(For to increase your knowledge you must die)
Tell me if all that learning be not vain,
On which we proudly in this life rely.

Is not the learning which we knowledge call,
Our own but by opinion and in part?
Not made entirely certain, nor to all,
And is not knowledge but disputed art?

And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,
Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,
Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,
While we still follow, and still doubt our way;

A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,
Who guessingly her progress doth begin;
And brings us back where first she led us out,
To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.

It is a plummet to so short a line,
As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;
The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,
Nor far above the middle region rise.

This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,
Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;
She steals to nature’s closet, and from thence
Brings nought but undecyphered characters.

She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boast
Of adding to old maps; though she has bin
But sailing by some clear and open coast,
Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.

Of this forbidden fruit since we but gain
A taste, by which we only hungry grow,
We merely toil to find our studies vain,
And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’

P. 150, No. cxxviii.--This poem, apart from its proper beauty, which is very considerable, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ Wordsworth’s still higher strain, namely his _Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_. I do not mean that Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his. The coincidences are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, the _Silex Scintillans_ was altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought for elsewhere. The complete forgetfulness into which poetry, which, though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one, may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions of Vaughan’s poems. The first edition of the first part of the _Silex Scintillans_ appeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847. Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in his _Theatrum Poetarum_, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by his _Olor Iscanus_, a juvenile production, of comparatively little worth; yet seeing that it yields such lines as the following--they form part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, our first James’ daughter--it cannot be affirmed to be of none:

Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;
A flower of purpose sprung to bow
To heedless tempests and the rage
Of an incensèd stormy age:

And yet as balm-trees gently spend
Their tears for those that do them rend,
Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,
But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’

As a divine Vaughan may be inferior, but as a poet he is certainly superior, to Herbert, who never wrote anything so purely poetical as _The Retreat_. Still Vaughan would probably never have written as he has, if Herbert, whom he gratefully owns as his master, had not shown him the way.

P. 154, No. cxxxii.--This poem, so little known, though the work of one so well known, opens very solemnly and grandly, but does not maintain itself altogether at the same height to the end. Even as I have given it, the two concluding strophes are inferior to the others; and this declension would be felt by the reader still more strongly, if I had not at once lightened the poem, and brought it within reasonable compass, by the omission of no less than six strophes which immediately precede these. It bears date January 14, 1682/3; and was written at season of great weakness and intense bodily suffering (see his _Life_ edited by Sylvester, Part III. p. 192); but the actual life of the great non-conformist divine was prolonged for some eight or nine years more.

P. 163, No. cxxxviii.--I have gladly found room in this volume, as often as I fairly could, for poems written by those who, strictly speaking, were not poets; or who, if poets, have only rarely penned their inspiration, and, either wanting the accomplishment of verse, or not caring to use it, have preferred to embody thoughts which might have claimed a metrical garb in other than metrical forms. Poems from such authors must always have a special interest for us. To the former of these classes the author of these manly and high-hearted lines belongs, and another whose epitaph on his companions left behind in the Arctic regions is earlier given (see No. cxix.). Bacon (for who can deny to him a poet’s gifts?) and, before all others as a poet in prose, Jeremy Taylor, belong to the second. It would be more difficult to affirm of Bishop Berkeley (see No. cxxxvii.), and of Sir Thomas Browne (see No. cxxxi.), to which of these classes they ought to be assigned.

P. 166, No. cxxxix.--These lines, in their wit worthy of Lucian, and with a moral purpose which oftentimes Lucian is wholly without, are called A Fable, but manifestly have no right to the name. I have omitted six lines, but with reluctance, being as in fact they are among the most moral lines in the whole poem.

P. 169, No. cxli.--This is a party ballad, and, rightly to understand it, we must understand the circumstances of which it assumes on our part a knowledge. In 1727 Admiral Hosier blockaded Porto-Bello with twenty ships; but was not allowed to attack it, war not having actually broken out with Spain, and, a peace being patched up, his squadron was withdrawn. In 1740 Admiral Vernon took Porto-Bello with six ships. It was apparently a very creditable exploit; but Vernon being an enemy of Walpole’s, and a member of the Opposition, it was glorified by them beyond its merits. When they boasted that he with six ships had effected what Hosier had not been allowed to attempt with twenty, the statement was a perfectly true one, but in nothing dishonourable to him or to his employers. Glover is here the mouthpiece of the Opposition, who, while they exalted Vernon, affected to pity Hosier, who had died, as they declared, of a broken heart; and of whose losses by disease during the blockade they did not fail to make the most. It is a fine ballad, and will do for Glover what his _Leonidas_ would altogether have failed to do. This we may confidently affirm, whether we quite agree with Lord Stanhope or not, that it is ‘the noblest song perhaps ever called forth by any British victory, except Mr. Campbell’s _Battle of the Baltic_.’

P. 172, No. cxlii.--This poem was for a while supposed to be old, and an old line has been worked up into it. This was probably the refrain of an older as it is of the more modern poem, which has Miss Elliott, (1727-1805), an accomplished lady of the Minto family, for its author.--l. 1: ‘lilting,’ singing cheerfully.--l. 3: ‘loaning,’ broad lane.--l. 5: ‘scorning,’ rallying.--l. 6: ‘dowie’ dreary.--l. 8: ‘leglin,’ milkpail.--l. 9: ‘shearing’ reaping.--l. 10: ‘bandsters,’ sheaf-binders.--‘lyart,’ inclining to gray.--‘runkled,’ wrinkled.--l. 11: ‘fleeching,’ coaxing.--l. 14: ‘bogle,’ ghost.

P. 176, No. cxlvi.--One who listens very attentively may catch in these pretty lines a faint prelude of Wordsworth’s immortal poem addressed to the same bird.

P. 177, No. cxlvii.--There can scarcely be a severer trial of the poet’s power of musical expression, of his command of the arts by which melody is produced, than the unrhymed lyric, which very seldom perfectly satisfies the ear. That Collins has so completely succeeded here is itself a sufficient answer to Gray’s assertion that he ‘had a bad ear,’ to Johnson’s complaint, ‘his lines commonly are of slow motion; clogged and impeded with a cluster of consonants.’ Collins, in whom those lines of Wordsworth found only too literal a fulfilment,

‘We poets do begin our lives in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,’

has falsified the prediction of Gray. Writing of him and of Warton, who both had lately died, Gray passes this judgment upon them, ‘They both deserve to live some years, but will not.’ Half of this prophecy has come true; and Warton cannot be said to have lasted to our time; but Collins has now won a position so assured that instead of the ‘some years’ which were all that Gray would have allotted to him, we may confidently affirm that he will live as long as any love for English poetry survives.

P. 181, No. cl.--This and the following poem are of the court, courtly. At the same time a truly poetical treatment may raise _vers de Société_ such as these are, into a higher sphere than their own; and if I do not mistake, it has done so here; and may justly claim for these poems that they be drawn from the absolute oblivion into which they have fallen. Ambrose Philips, it is true, has a niche in _Johnson’s Poets_; but so much which is stupid, and so much which is worse than stupid, finds its place there, that for a minor poet, for all except those mighty ones to whom admission or exclusion would be a matter of absolute indifference, who are strong enough to burst any cerements, that collection is rather a mausoleum of the dead than a temple of the living. These poems with two or three others of like kind--a singularly beautiful one is quoted in Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_--earned for Philips the title of Namby Pamby, so little were his contemporaries able to appreciate even the partial return to nature which they display. For a clever travesty of his style by Isaac Hawkins Browne, beginning,

‘Little tube of mighty power,
Charmer of an idle hour,’

see Campbell’s _Specimens_, vol. v. p. 361.

P. 186, No. cliii.--This admirable poem has this in common with another of scarcely inferior merit,

‘And ye shall walk in silk attire,’

that they both first appeared as broad-sheets sold in the streets of Edinburgh; and, justly popular as they both from the first have been, no one has ever cared to challenge either of them as his own. This, however, though not claimed by Mickle, nor included by him in an edition of his poems published by himself, was after his death claimed _for_ him, and Allan Cunningham thinks the claim to be fairly made out. It mainly rests on the fact that a copy of the poem with alterations marking the text as in process of formation was found among his papers and in his handwriting. Without inspection of the document, it is impossible to say what value as evidence it possesses. Certainly everything else which we know of Mickle’s is rather evidence against his authorship of this exquisite domestic lyric than for it. Still I have not felt myself at liberty to disturb the ascription of it to him.

P. 189, No. clv.--The immense superiority of this poem over every other in the little volume of Hamilton of Bangour’s poems, which was published at Edinburgh in 1760, some six years after his death, is not easy to account for. This poem has its faults; that it is a modern seeking to write in an ancient manner is sometimes too evident; but it is a tragic story tragically told, the situation boldly conceived, and the treatment marked by strength and passion throughout. Nothing else in the volume contains a trace of passion or of power, or is of the slightest value whatever. The fact that the poet has here come within the circle of the inspirations of Yarrow cannot of itself be accepted as sufficient to explain a fact which is certainly a curious one. It is plain from more than one citation or allusion that Wordsworth, in his _Yarrow Unvisited_ and _Yarrow Visited_, had this poem quite as much in his eye as the earlier ballads whose scene is laid on the banks of the same stream.

P. 199, No. clx.--I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of quoting Mr. Palgrave’s beautiful criticism of this sonnet, in its own kind of a beauty so peerless:--‘The Editor knows no sonnet more remarkable than this which records Cowper’s gratitude to the Lady whose affectionate care for many years gave what sweetness he could enjoy to a life radically wretched. Petrarch’s sonnets have a more ethereal grace and a more perfect finish, Shakespeare’s more passion, Milton’s stand supreme in stateliness, Wordsworth’s in depth and delicacy. But Cowper’s unites with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the ancients would have called irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness peculiar to his loving and ingenuous nature.’

P. 201, No. clxii.--Gray, who esteemed Tickell ‘a poor short-winded imitator of Addison,’ qualifies his contempt so far that he adds, ‘His ballad, however, of Colin and Lucy I always thought the prettiest in the world.’ After some hesitation I have not thought it pretty enough for a place in this volume. It is otherwise with the poem for which I have found room. Johnson’s censure of poems, whether praise or blame, carries no great weight with it; and when he says of this one, ‘nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral poem to be found in the whole compass of English literature,’ the praise is extravagant. Still it has real merits, and sounds like the genuine utterance of a true regret for one who had been the poet’s effectual patron and friend.

P. 204, No. clxiii.--There have been many guesses who the ‘Unfortunate Lady’ commemorated in these pathetic, but thoroughly pagan, lines may have been; but the mystery which wraps her story has never been dispersed. With the ten first lines before us nothing can be idler than to deny that she was one who had laid violent hands on her own life.

P. 207, No. clxiv.--Robert Levet lived above twenty years under Johnson’s roof, a dependant and humble friend, and when under it he died in 1782, Johnson commemorated his genuine worth in these admirable lines. He is mentioned several times in Boswell’s _Life_.

P. 209, No. clxvi.--This is the last original piece which Cowper wrote; and, as Southey has truly observed, ‘all circumstances considered, one of the most affecting that ever was composed.’ The incident on which it rests is related in Anson’s _Voyage round the World_, fifth edition, p. 79.

P. 212, No. clxviii.--This noblest elegy has a point of contact with an illustrious event in English history. As the boats were advancing in silence to that night-assault upon the lines of Quebec which should give Canada to the English crown, Wolfe repeated these lines in a low voice to the other officers in his boat, adding at the close of the recitation, ‘Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.’ For himself within a few hours that line was to find its fulfilment,

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’

We owe to Lord Stanhope (_History of England from the Peace of Utrecht_, c. 35) this interesting anecdote.--l. 45-72: Gray, who had read almost everything, may have here had in his eye a remarkable passage in Philo, _De Sobriet_. § 9. Having spoken of the many who were inwardly equipped with the highest gifts and faculties, he goes on: τὀ δἐ κάλλος τῶν ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ἀγαλμάτων οὐκ ίσχυσαν ἐπιδείξασθαι δ’ἀ πενίαν ἠ ἀδοξίαν, ἠ νόσον σώματος, ἠ τἀς αλλας κῆρας, όσαι τὀν ἀνθρώπινον περιπολοῦσι βίον. And then he goes on, exactly as Gray does, to point out how these outward hindrances have circumscribed not merely the virtues of some but the crimes of others: πάλιν τοίνυν κατἀ τἀ ἐναντία μυρίους ἐστἰν ἰδιῖν ἀνάνδρούς, ἀκολάστους, ἀφρονας, ἀδίκους, ἀσεβεῖς ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ὑπάρχοντας, τὀ δἐ κακίας ἐκάστης αίσχος ἀδυνατοῦντας ἐπιδεικνυσθαι δἰ ἀκαιμίαν τῶν εἰς τὀ ἁμαρτάνειν καιρῶν.

P. 216, No. clxix.--I have not included hymns in this collection, save only in rare instances when a high poetical treatment of their theme has given them a value quite independent of that which they derive from adequately fulfilling the special objects for which they were composed. It is thus with this noble poem, which, though not eminently adapted for liturgic use, is yet to my mind quite the noblest among Charles Wesley’s hymns. It need hardly be said that the key to it, so far as a key can be found from without and not from within, lies in the study of Gen. xxxii. 24-32.--l. 59: The attempt to break down in English the distinction between the perfect and the past participle, and because they are identical in some instances to regard them as identical in all, has happily been defeated, at least for the present; but it has left its mark on much of the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and Wesley, who here writes ‘strove’ for ‘striven,’ and l. 68, ‘rose’ for ‘risen,’ only does what Shakespeare and Milton have done before him.

P. 241, No. cxci.--Campbell’s _Lord Ullin’s Daughter_ is a poem of considerable merit, but a comparison of it with this of Shelley (the motive of the two compositions is identical) at once reveals the distinction between a poet of first-rate eminence, of ‘imagination all compact,’ and one of the second order. Both poems are narrative; but the imagination in one has fused and absorbed the whole action of the story into itself in a way which is not so much as attempted in the other.

P. 256, No. ccviii.--In Beattie’s _Life and Letters of Campbell_, vol. ii. p. 42, we have the original sketch of this poem. It is very instructive, revealing as it does how one chief secret of success in poetry may be the daring to omit. As it is there sketched out, extending as it does to twenty stanzas of six lines each, that is to more than twice its present length, many of these stanzas being but of secondary merit, it would have passed as a spirited ballad, and would have presently been forgotten, instead of taking as it has now done its place among the noblest lyrics, the trumpet-notes in the language. But indeed this willingness to sacrifice parts to the interests of the whole is a condition without which no great poem, least of all a great lyric poem, which is absolutely dependent for its effects on rapidity of movement, can be written; and those who would fain escape the inevitable doom of oblivion which awaits almost all verse will do well to keep ever in remembrance how immeasurably more in poetry the half will sometimes be than the whole.

P. 265, No. ccxiv.--There is a mistake here, into which it is curious that one who had watched so closely as Scott had done the struggle with Republican and Imperial France should have fallen. It was not Marengo (1800) but Austerlitz (1805) which did so much to kill Pitt, and with which is connected the anecdote of his last days here referred to, and thus related by Lord Stanhope: ‘On leaving his carriage, as he passed along the passage to his bedroom [at Putney, which he never left], he observed a map of Europe which had been drawn down from the wall; upon which he turned to his niece, and mournfully said, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.”’ (_Life of Pitt_, vol. iv. p. 369.)

P. 266, No. ccxv.--After the battle of Novara, which had virtually decided the conflict for a time, but before peace was signed between Austria and Piedmont, the inhabitants of Brescia rose against their Austrian garrison, March 21, 1849. They were crushed after a gallant struggle, but one which had been hopeless from the first.

P. 277, No. ccxix.--This poem is full of allusions to the tragical issues of Shelley’s first rash and ill-considered marriage--issues which must have filled him ever after with very deep self-reproach. Far too slight as the expression of this is here--indeed it is hardly here at all--we know from other sources that the retrospect was one which went far to darken his whole after life. This serious fault has not hindered me from quoting these lines, in many respects of an exquisite tenderness and beauty, and possessing that deep interest which autobiography must always possess. One stanza has been omitted.

P. 291, No. ccxxiv.--These lines, written in Greece, and only three months before his death, are the last which Byron wrote, and, in their earlier stanzas at least, about the truest. In many of his smaller poems of passion, and in _Childe Harold_ itself, there is a _falsetto_ which strikes painfully on the ear of the mind. But it is quite otherwise with these deeply pathetic lines, in which the spoiled child of this world passes judgment on that whole life of self-pleasing which he had laid out for himself, and declares what had been the mournful end of it all.

P. 315, No. ccxlvii.--This, if I mistake not, is the only poem by Herbert Knowles which survives. It appeared first in _The Quarterly Review_, vol. ii. p. 396, with this account of the writer: ‘His life had been eventful and unfortunate, till his extraordinary merits were discovered by persons capable of appreciating and willing and able to assist him. He was then placed under a kind and able instructor, and arrangements had been made for supporting him at the University; but he had not enjoyed that prospect many weeks before it pleased God to remove him to a better world. The reader will remember that they are the verses of a schoolboy, who had not long been taken from one of the lowest stations of life, and he will then judge what might have been expected from one who was capable of writing with such strength and originality upon the tritest of all subjects.’ It was Southey, I believe, who wrote thus, in whose estimate of these verses I entirely concur; as it was he who was prepared to befriend the youthful poet, if he had not passed so soon beyond the reach and need of human help.

P. 326, No. cclvii.--It is not a little remarkable that one to whom English was an acquired language, who can have had little or no experience in the mechanism of English verse, should yet have left us what Coleridge does not hesitate to call, ‘the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language’--words, it is true, which he slightly modifies by adding, ‘at least it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth that I remember any rival.’

P. 352, No. cclxxii.--This poem is drawn from a small volume with the title, _David and Samuel, with other Poems_, published in the year 1859. Much in the volume has no right to claim exemption from the doom which before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half ironical, of Goethe’s lighter pieces; while more than one of the more uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit. It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the Eastern world.

P. 354, No. cclxxiii.--During the last Chinese war the following passage occurred in a letter of the Correspondent of _The Times_: ‘Some Seiks, and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.’

P. 356, No. cclxxiv.--Turner’s fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the French) towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very high order, which has here been finely transferred into verse.

P. 359, No. cclxxviii.--A selection of Walt Whitman’s poetry has very lately been published in England, the editor of this declaring that in him American poetry properly so-called begins. I must entirely dissent from this statement. What he has got to say is a very old story indeed, and no one would have attended to his version of it, if he had not put it more uncouthly than others before him. That there is no contradiction between higher and lower, that there is no holy and no profane, that the flesh has just as good rights as the spirit--this has never wanted prophets to preach it, nor people to act upon it; and this is the sum-total of his message to America and to the world. I was glad to find in his _Drum-taps_ one little poem which I could quote with real pleasure.

P. 379, No. ccxcviii.--_Tithonus_ is a noble variation on Juvenal’s noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and temper,

Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat
Naturæ:

words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in Dryden’s translation,

‘And count it nature’s privilege to die.’

P. 386, No. ccciv.--Few readers of this and other choice specimens of American poetry--some of which have now for the first time found their way into any English anthology--but will share the admiration which I cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson and by others, do, so far as they reach, leave nothing to be desired.

INDEX OF AUTHORS.

NO.

ALDRICH, James (1810-1856), CCXCVII

ALFORD, Henry, _b._ 1810, CCC

ARNOLD, Edwin, _b._ 1831, CCLXXXVII

ARNOLD, Matthew, _b._ 1822, CCLVIII

AYTOUN, Sir Robert (1570-1638), XIV

BACON, Lord (1561-1616), IV

BAILLIE, Joanna (1762-1851), CLXXXVII

BAXTER, Richard (1615-1691), CXXXII

BEAUMONT (1586-1616) and FLETCHER (1576-1625), XXIV, XXVI,
XXVII, XXVIII, XLIII

BEAUMONT, Francis (1586-1616), LV

BEAUMONT, Sir John (1582-1628), LIII

BEDDOES, Thomas Lovell (1803-1849), CCXXXI

BERKELEY, George (1684-1753), CXXXVII

BLACKSTONE, Sir William (1723-1780), CXXXVIII

BLAKE, William (1757-1828), CLXXV, CLXXXIII, CXCIV, CCXXXVI, CCXXXIX

BOWLES, William L., (1762-1850), CLXXVIII

BROWNE, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), CXXXI

BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett (1809-1861), CCXL, CCLIV

BROWNING, Robert, _b._ 1812, CCLIX, CCLXXXVIII, CCLXXXIX

BRYANT, William Cullen, _b._ 1794, CCLX, CCLXIII

BUCHANAN, Robert, _b._ 1841, CCXCIV

BURBIDGE, Thomas, _b._ 1816, CCLXI, CCLXIV

BURNS, Robert (1759-1796), CXLVIII, CLIV, CLXV

BYRON, Lord (1788-1824), CLXXXVI, CCIII, CCXIII, CCXXIV

CAMPBELL, Thomas (1777-1844), CLXXI, CCVII, CCVIII, CCL

CAMPION, Thomas, XXII

CAREW, Thomas (1589-1639), LXV, LXXX, CXX

CHARLES I. (1600-1649), CII

CLARE, John (1793-1864), CLXXVII

CLEVELAND, John (1613-1659), XLVI

CLOUGH, Arthur Hugh (1819-1861), CCXXV, CCXXIX, CCXXXV

COLERIDGE, Hartley (1796-1849), CLXXXVIII, CXCV, CXCVI

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), CLXXIX, CLXXXV, CCXVI, CCXX

COLLINS, William (1720-1756), CXLV, CXLVII

COTTON, Charles (1630-1687), LXXXVII

COWLEY, Abraham (1618-1677), LXXXVIII, CV, CVI

COWPER, William (1731-1800), CLX, CLXI, CLXVI

CRASHAW, Richard (1600-1650), CXVII

CROLY, George (1780-1860), CLXXXIV

CUNNINGHAM, Allan (1784-1842), CCLII

DAVENANT, Sir William (1605-1668), C, CVII, CXXVI, CLII

DE VERE, Aubrey, _b._ 1814, CCLXXXI

DONNE, John (1573-1631), LXIV, CXXIII, CXXIV

DOUBLEDAY, Thomas, CLXXXI, CLXXXII

DOYLE, Sir Francis Hastings, _b._ 1810, CCLXXIII

DRAYTON, Michael (1563-1631), XXXV, XLI

DRUMMOND, William (1585-1649), XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, LI

DRYDEN, John (1631-1700), LXXXIX, XC, CXIII, CXXIV

EASTMAN, Charles Gammage, CCXCVI

ELLIOT, Ebenezer (1781-1841), CC

ELLIOTT, Jane (1727-1805), CXLII, CC

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, _b._ 1803, CCLXII, CCLXXV

FALKLAND, Lord (1610-1643), CXIV

FANSHAWE, Sir Richard (1608-1666), LXIX

FORSTER, John, _b._ 1812, CCLXXX

GAY, John (1688-1732), CXXXIX

GLEN, William, CXLIII

GLOVER, Richard (1712-1785), CXLI

GRAY, David (1838-1861), CCXXXIII, CCXXXIV, CCXXXV

GRAY, Thomas (1716-1771), CXLIX, CLVII, CLXVIII

GREENE, Robert (1560-1592), XXI

HABINGTON, William (1605-1645), LXX, LXXI

HALE, Sir Matthew (1609-1676), CIX

HALLAM, Arthur Henry (1811-1834), CCII

HAMILTON, William (1704-1754), CLV

HERBERT, George (1593-1632), LXXXI, CXXVII

HERRICK, Robert (1591-1674), LXVI, LXXXII

HOLMES, Oliver Wendell, _b._ 1809, CCCI

HOLYDAY, Barten (1593-1661), XCI

HOOD, Thomas (1798-1845), CCXLVI

HOUGHTON, Lord, _b._ 1809, CCLXV, CCLXXIV

HUME, Alexander (1560-1607), VIII

HUNNIS, William, XIII

HUNT, Leigh (1784-1859), CXCVII

IRVING, Edward (1792-1834), CCLV

JAMES, Thomas (17th Century), CXIX

JOHNSON, Samuel (1709-1784), CLXIV

JONES, Sir William (1746-1794), CXLIV

JONSON, Ben (1574-1637), XXIII, XL, XLII, XLV

KEATS, John (1795-1821), CXCIII, CCI, CCXXII, CCXXVII

KEBLE, John (1792-1866), CCXLIV, CCLIII

KING, Henry (1591-1669), LXXII, CVIII, CXXI

KINGSLEY, Charles, _b._ 1819, CCLXXXII, CCXCV

KNOWLES, Herbert (1798-1817), CCXLVII

LAMB, Charles (1775-1835), CCXXXII, CCXLII

LANDOR, Walter Savage (1775-1864), CCXLIII, CCLI

LINDSAY, Lady Anne (1750-1825), CLVI

LOGAN, John (1748-1788), CXLVI

LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth, _b._ 1807, CCLXXVI, CCLXXXIII

LOVELACE, Richard (1618-1658), XCVII, XCVIII

LUSHINGTON, Henry (1812-1855), CCXV

MACAULAY, Lord (1800-1859), CCV

MACDONALD, George, _b._ 1824, CCLXXXIV

MARLOWE, Christopher (1562-1593), XIX

MARVELL, Andrew (1620-1678), LXXIX, CIII, CXXIX

MICKLE, William Julius (1734-1788), CLIII

MILTON, John (1608-1674), LXXVIII, LXXXIII, LXXXV,
LXXXVI, CIV, CXVI, CXXV, CCXLIX

MONTGOMERY, James (1771-1854), CLXXII

MONTROSE, Marquis of (1612-1651), XCVI

MOORE, Thomas (1780-1852), CCXXX, CCXLIX

NAIRN, Lady (1766-1845), CLXVII

NEWCASTLE, Duchess of (1624-1673), XCII

NEWMAN, John Henry, _b._ 1801, CCXC, CCCII

OXFORD, Earl of (1534-1604), XI

PALMER, John Williamson, CCXCIII

PATMORE, Coventry, _b._ 1823, CCLXIX, CCLXX

PHILIPS, Ambrose (1671-1749), CL, CLI

POPE, Alexander (1688-1744), CXXXV, CLXIII

QUARLES, Francis (1592-1644), CXII

RALEIGH, Sir Walter (1552-1618), III, XVIII, LIX

ROBERTSON, John, CCLXXII

SCOTT, Sir Walter (1771-1832), CLXXXIX, CXC, CCVI, CCXIV, CCXXVIII

SEWARD, Anna (1747-1809), CLXXVI

SHAKESPEARE, William (1594-1616), XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XLVIII, XLIX, LIV

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), CXCI, CCXIX,
CCXXI, CCXXIII, CCXXXVII, CCXLVIII

SHEPHERD, Nathaniel G., CCLXVI

SHIRLEY, James (1596-1666), LVI, LVII

SIDNEY, Sir Philip (1554-1586), XXV, XXVI

SOUTHEY, Robert (1774-1843), CLXXIII

SOUTHWELL, Robert (1560-1593), XLIV, L

SPENSER, Edmund (1553-1598), XVI, XVII, LX

STILLINGFLEET, Benjamin, CLVIII

STIRLING, Earl of (1580-1640), XXVII

STODDARD, Richard Henry, _b._ 1825, CCLXXIX

STORY, William, _b._ 1819, CCLXVIII

STRONG, Charles, CCIV

SURREY, Earl of (1520-1546), IX, XII

SWIFT, Jonathan (1667-1745), CXXXVI

SYLVESTER, Joshua (1563-1618), VII, XLVII

TAYLOR, Henry, _b._ 1805, CCXCII

TAYLOR, Jane (1783-1823), CLXXIV

TAYLOR, Jeremy (1613-1667), CXXXIII

TENNYSON, Alfred, _b._ 1809, CCLXVII, CCXCI, CCXCVIII, CCXCIX

TENNYSON, Charles, CCLXXXV, CCLXXXVI

TERRY, Rose, CCLXXI

THACKERAY, William Makepeace (1811-1863), CCXLI

THOMSON, James (1699-1748), CXL

THURLOW, Lord (1781-1829), CXCVIII, CXCIX

TICKELL, Thomas (1686-1720), CLXII

TRENCH, Melesina (1767-1827), CCXLV

TYCHBORN, Chidiock ( -1586), LVIII

VAUGHAN, Henry (1621-1695), LXXXIV, CXXVIII, CXXX, CXXXIV

WALLER, Edmund (1605-1687), LXVIII

WARTON, Thomas (1728-1790), CLIX

WASTELL, Simon, LII

WESLEY, Charles (1708-1788), CLXIX

WHITE, Blanco (1773-1840), CCLVII

WHITMAN, Walter, _b._ 1819, CCLXXVIII

WHITTIER, John Greenleaf, _b._ 1808, CCLXXVII, CCCIV

WILD, Robert, CXVIII

WILSON, John (1785-1854), CCLVI

WITHER, George (1588-1667), XCIII, CX

WOLFE, Charles (1791-1823), CCXII, CCXXXVIII

WORDSWORTH, William (1770-1850), CLXX, CLXXX, CXCII, CCIX,
CCX, CCXI, CCXVII, CCXVIII, CCXXVI

WOTTON, Sir Henry (1568-1639), LXII, XCIV

WYAT, Sir Thomas (1503-1542), X

ANONYMOUS, I, II, V, VI, XV, XX, XXXIX, LXI, LXIII,
LXVII, LXXIII, LXXIV, LXXV, LXXVI, LXXVII,
XCV, XCIX, CI, CXI, CXV, CXXII, CCIV, CCCIII

INDEX OF FIRST LINES.

PAGE

Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint, 137

A cloud lay cradled near the setting sun, 326

Again the violet of our early days, 248

A good that never satisfies the mind, 30

A grace though melancholy, manly too, 369

A heavenly Night! methinks to me, 341

Ah Sunflower! weary of time, 245

A hundred wings are dropt as soft as one, 365

Ah! what a weary race my feet have run, 198

Ah! what avails the sceptred race, 320

A juggler long through all the town, 166

Alexis, here she stayed; among these pines, 31

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 234

All travellers at first incline, 160

All worldly shapes shall melt in gloom, 318

Although I enter not, 308

And are ye sure the news is true?, 186

An hour with thee!--When earliest day, 240

Another year!--another deadly blow!, 259

Art thou pale for weariness, 305

As, by some tyrant’s stern command, 163

As due by many titles, I resign, 141

As I lay asleep, as I lay asleep, 374

Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea, 349

Ask me no more where Jove bestows, 60

Ask me why I send you here, 60

A slanting ray of evening light, 225

As near Porto-Bello lying, 169

A steed, a steed of matchless speed, 108

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones, 117

Awake, Æolian lyre, awake, 194

Away, let nought to love displeasing, 58

A wee bird came to our ha’ door, 173

Beat on, proud billows; Boreas, blow, 109

Beneath an Indian palm a girl, 346

Beside the covered grave, 266

Between two sister moorland rills, 270

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy, 81

Bloom of beauty, early flower, 181

Blossom of the almond trees, 366

Burly, dozing humble-bee, 342

Busk ye, busk ye, my bonnie, bonnie bride, 189

Can I see another’s woe, 306

Can I, who have for others oft compiled, 49

Child of a day, thou knowest not, 311

Come, dear children, let us away, 327

Come live with me, and be my love, 22

Come, O Thou traveller unknown, 216

Come, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving, 33

Come Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, 28

Come up from the fields, father; here’s a letter from our Pete, 359