This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry. Ac. Ukfrom the 1893 Grant Richards edition of The Flower of the Mind andthe 1902 John Lane edition of Later Poems. THE FLOWER OF THE MIND INTRODUCTION Partial collections of English poems, decided by a common subjector bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, aremade at very short intervals, and the makers are safe from thereproach of proposing their own personal taste as a guide for thereading of others. But a general Anthology gathered from the wholeof English literature--the whole from Chaucer to Wordsworth--by agatherer intent upon nothing except the quality of poetry, is amore rare enterprise. It is hardly to be made without tempting thesuspicion--nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the confession--ofsome measure of self-confidence. Nor can even the desire to enterupon that labour be a frequent one--the desire of the heart of onefor whom poetry is veritably "the complementary life" to set up apale for inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiplyhomage, to cherish, to restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose;and to gain the consent of a multitude of readers to all thoseacts. Many years, then--some part of a century--may easily passbetween the publication of one general anthology and the making ofanother. The enterprise would be a sorry one if it were really arbitrary, and if an anthologist should give effect to passionate preferenceswithout authority. An anthology that shall have any value must bemade on the responsibility of one but on the authority of many. There is no caprice; the mind of the maker has been formed fordecision by the wisdom of many instructors. It is the very studyof criticism, and the grateful and profitable study, that gives thejustification to work done upon the strongest personal impulse, anddone, finally, in the mental solitude that cannot be escaped at thelast. In another order, moral education would be best crowned ifit proved to have quick and profound control over the firstimpulses; its finished work would be to set the soul in a state oflaw, delivered from the delays of self-distrust; not action only, but the desires would be in an old security, and a wish would cometo light already justified. This would be the second--if it werenot the only--liberty. Even so an intellectual education mightassuredly confer freedom upon first and solitary thoughts, andconfidence and composure upon the sallies of impetuous courage. Ina word, it should make a studious anthologist quite sure aboutgenius. And all who have bestowed, or helped in bestowing, theliberating education have given their student the authority to befree. Personal and singular the choice in such a book must be, notwithout right. Claiming and disclaiming so much, the gatherers may follow oneanother to harvest, and glean in the same fields in differentseasons, for the repetition of the work can never be altogether arepetition. The general consent of criticism does not stand still;and moreover, a mere accident has until now left a poet of geniusof the past here and there to neglect or obscurity. This is notvery likely to befall again; the time has come when there is littleor nothing left to discover or rediscover in the sixteenth centuryor the seventeenth; we know that there does not lurk anotherCrashaw contemned, or another Henry Vaughan disregarded, or anotherGeorge Herbert misplaced. There is now something like finality ofknowledge at least; and therefore not a little error in the past isready to be repaired. This is the result of time. Of the slowactions and reactions of critical taste there might be something tosay, but nothing important. No loyal anthologist perhaps willconsent to acknowledge these tides; he will hardly do his work wellunless he believe it to be stable and perfect; nor, by the way, will he judge worthily in the name of others unless he be resolvedto judge intrepidly for himself. Inasmuch as even the best of all poems are the best uponinnumerable degrees, the size of most anthologies has gone far todecide what degrees are to be gathered in and what left without. The best might make a very small volume, and be indeed the best, ora very large volume, and be still indeed the best. But my labourhas been to do somewhat differently--to gather nothing that did notoverpass a certain boundary-line of genius. Gray's Elegy, forinstance, would rightly be placed at the head of everything belowthat mark. It is, in fact, so near to the work of genius as to bemost directly, closely, and immediately rebuked by genius; it meetsgenius at close quarters and almost deserves that Shakespearehimself should defeat it. Mediocrity said its own true word in theElegy: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. " But greatness had said its own word also in a sonnet: "The summer flower is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die. " The reproof here is too sure; not always does it touch so quick, but it is not seldom manifest, and it makes exclusion a simpletask. Inclusion, on the other hand, cannot be so completelyfulfilled. The impossibility of taking in poems of great length, however purely lyrical, is a mechanical barrier, even on the planof the present volume; in the case of Spenser's Prothalamion, theunmanageably autobiographical and local passage makes itinappropriate; some exquisite things of Landor's are lyrics inblank verse, and the necessary rule against blank verse shuts themout. No extracts have been made from any poem, but in a very fewinstances a stanza or a passage has been dropped out. No poem hasbeen put in for the sake of a single perfectly fine passage; itwould be too much to say that no poem has been put in for the sakeof two splendid passages or so. The Scottish ballad poetry isrepresented by examples that are to my mind finer than anythingleft out; still, it is but represented; and as the song of thismultitude of unknown poets overflows by its quantity a collectionof lyrics of genius, so does severally the song of Wordsworth, Crashaw, and Shelley. It has been necessary, in consideringtraditional songs of evidently mingled authorship, to reject someone invaluable stanza or burden--the original and ancient survivingmatter of a spoilt song--because it was necessary to reject thesequel that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took it forhis own. An example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden ofkeen and remote poetry: "O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom, The broom of Cowdenknowes!" Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as thesetogether one day, freed from what is alien in the work of therestorer. It is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbidthe restoration of ancient buildings should approve the eighteenthcentury restoration of ancient poems; nay, the architectural"restorer" is immeasurably the more respectful. In order to giveus again the ancient fragments, it is happily not necessary tobreak up the composite songs which, since the time of Burns, havegained a national love. Let them be, but let the old verses bealso; and let them have, for those who desire it, the solitarinessof their state of ruin. Even in the cases--and they are not few--where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the ancientfragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably finerthan his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would beless than impiety to part the two. I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hopewill be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, inleaving aside a multitude of composite songs--anachronisms, andworse than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patchwild feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are someexceptions. The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir WalterScott and Burns restored is given with the restorations of both, those restorations being severally beautiful; and the burden, "Hame, hame, hame, " is printed with the Jacobite song that carriesit; this song seems so mingled and various in date and origin thatno apology is needed for placing it amongst the bundle of Scottishballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir Patrick Spens is treatedhere as an ancient song. It is to be noted that the modern, orcomparatively modern, additions to old songs full of quantitativemetre--"Hame, hame, hame, " is one of these--full of long notes, rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written inanapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine, various, and subtle metre of the older. Assuredly the popularityof the metre which, for want of a term suiting the English rules ofverse, must be called anapaestic, has done more than any otherthing to vulgarise the national sense of rhythm and to silence thefiner rhythms. Anapaests came quite suddenly into English poetryand brought coarseness, glibness, volubility, dapper and fatuouseffects. A master may use it well, but as a popular measure it hasbeen disastrous. I would be bound to find the modern stanzas in anold song by this very habit of anapaests and this verymisunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of theolder stanzas. This, for instance, is the old metre: "Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!" and this the lamentable anapaestic line (from the same song): "Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me -. " It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including ADivine Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out fourstanzas of a poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorestargument. This passage at least shall speak for the first three: "Thou didst appearA glorious mystery, so dark, so clear, As Nature did intendAll should confess, but none might comprehend. " From Christ's Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach forits length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passageupon "Justice, " who looks "as the eagle "that hath so oft comparedHer eye with heaven's"; from Marlowe's poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran tothe priestess "And laid his childish head upon her breast"; with that which tells how Night, "deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world uponBreathed darkness forth"; from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage: "Cupid abroad was lated in the night, His wings were wet with ranging in the rain"; from Ben Jonson's Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza: "Beauties, have ye seen a toy, Called Love, a little boy, Almost naked, wanton, blind;Cruel now, and then as kind?If he be amongst ye, say;He is Venus' run-away"; from Francis Davison: "Her angry eyes are great with tears"; from George Wither: "I can go restOn her sweet breastThat is the pride of Cynthia's train"; from Cowley: "Return, return, gay planet of mine east"! The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, butthe citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love. At the very beginning, Skelton's song to "Mistress MargeryWentworth" had almost taken a place; but its charm is hardly fineenough. If it is necessary to answer the inevitable question in regard toByron, let me say that in another Anthology, a secondary Anthology, the one in which Gray's Elegy would have an honourable place, somemore of Byron's lyrics would certainly be found; and except thisthere is no apology. If the last stanza of the "Dying Gladiator"passage, or the last stanza on the cascade rainbow at Terni, "Love watching madness with unalterable mien, " had been separate poems instead of parts of Childe Harold, theywould have been amongst the poems that are here collected in nospirit of arrogance, or of caprice, of diffidence or doubt. The volume closes some time before the middle of the century andthe death of Wordsworth. A. M. -DP] Anonymous. The first carolSir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) Verses before deathEdmund Spenser (1553-1599) Easter Fresh spring Like as a ship EpithalamionJohn Lyly (1554?-1606) The SpringSir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) True love The moon Kiss Sweet judge Sleep Wat'red was my wineThomas Lodge (1556-1625) Rosalynd's madrigal Rosaline The solitary shepherd's songAnonymous I saw my lady weepGeorge Peele (1558?-1597) Farewell to armsRobert Greene (1560?-1592) Fawnia Sephestia's song to her childChristopher Marlowe (1562-1593) The passionate shepherd to his loveSamuel Daniel (1562-1619) Sleep My spotless loveMichael Drayton (1563-1631) Since there's no helpJoshua Sylvester (1563-1618) Were I as baseWilliam Shakespeare (1564-1616) Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth O me! What eyes hath love put in my head Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? When in the chronicle of wasted time That time of year thou may'st in me behold How like a winter hath my absence been Being your slave, what should I do but tend When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes They that have power to hurt, and will do Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing When to the sessions of sweet silent thought Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye The forward violet thus did I chide O lest the world should task you to recite Let me not to the marriage of true minds How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st Full many a glorious morning have I seen The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Fancy Fairies Come away Full fathom five Dirge (Fear no more the heat o' the sun) Song (Take, O take those lips away) Song (How should I your true love know)Anonymous Tom o' BedlamThomas Campion (circa 1567-1620) Kind are her answers Laura Her sacred bower Follow When thou must home Western wind Follow your saint Cherry-ripeThomas Nash (1567-1601?) SpringJohn Donne (1573-1631) This happy dream Death Hymn to God the father The funeralRichard Barnefield (1574?-?) The nightingaleBen Jonson (1574-1637) Charis' triumph Jealousy Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H. Hymn to Diana On my first daughter Echo's lament for Narcissus An epitaph on Salathiel Pavy, a child of Queen Elizabeth'sChapelJohn Fletcher (1579-1625) Invocation to sleep, from Valentinian To BacchusJohn Webster (-?1625) Song from the Duchess of Malfi Song from the Devil's Law-case In Earth, dirge from Vittoria CorombonaWilliam Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) Song (Phoebus, arise!) Sleep, Silence' child To the nightingale Madrigal I Madrigal IIBeaumont and Fletcher (1586-1616)-(1579-1625) I died trueFrancis Beaumont (1586-1616) On the tombs in Westminster AbbeySir Francis Kynaston (1587-1642) To Cynthia, on concealment of her beautyNathaniel Field (1587-1638) Matin songGeorge Wither (1588-1667) Sleep, baby, sleep!Thomas Carew (1589-1639) Song (Ask me no more where Jove bestows) To my inconstant mistress An hymeneal dialogue Ingrateful beauty threatenedThomas Dekker (-1638?) Lullaby Sweet contentThomas Heywood (-1649?) Good-morrowRobert Herrick (1591-1674?) To Dianeme To meadows To blossoms To daffodils To violets To primroses To daisies, not to shut so soon To the virgins, to make much of time Dress In silks Corinna's going a-maying Grace for a child Ben JonsonGeorge Herbert (1593-1632) Holy baptism Virtue Unkindness Love The pulley The collar Life MiseryJames Shirley (1596-1666) EqualityAnonymous (circa 1603) Lullaby (Weep you no more, sad fountains)Sir William Davenant (1605-1668) MorningEdmund Waller (1605-1687) The roseThomas Randolph (1606-1634?) His mistressCharles Best (-?) A sonnet of the moonJohn Milton (1608-1674) Hymn on Christ's nativity L'allegro Il penseroso Lycidas On his blindness On his deceased wife On Shakespeare Song on May morning Invocation to Sabrina, from Comus Invocation to Echo, from Comus The attendant spirit, from ComusJames Graham, Marquis of Montrose (1612-1650) The vigil of deathRichard Crashaw (1615?-1652) On a prayer-book sent to Mrs. M. R. To the morning Love's horoscope On Mr. G. Herbert's book Wishes to his supposed mistress Quem Vidistis Pastores etc. Music's duel The flaming heartAbraham Cowley (1618-1667) On the death of Mr. Crashaw Hymn to the lightRichard Lovelace (1618-1658) To Lucasta on going to the wars To Amarantha Lucasta To Althea, from prison A guiltless lady imprisoned: after penanced The roseAndrew Marvell (1620-1678) A Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland The picture of T. C. In a prospect of flowers The nymph complaining of death of her fawn The definition of love The gardenHenry Vaughan (1621-1695) The dawning Childhood Corruption The night The eclipse The retreat The world of lightScottish Ballads Helen of Kirconnell The wife of Usher's well The dowie dens of Yarrow Sweet William and May Margaret Sir Patrick Spens Hame, hame, hameBorder Ballad A lyke-wake dirgeJohn Dryden (1631-1700) Ode (Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies)Aphre Behn (1640-1689) Song, from AbdelazarJoseph Addison (1672-1719) Hymn (The spacious firmament on high)Alexander Pope (1688-1744) ElegyWilliam Cowper (1731-1800) Lines on receiving his mother's pictureAnna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) LifeWilliam Blake (1757-1828) The land of dreams The piper Holy Thursday The tiger To the muses Love's secretRobert Burns (1759-1796) To a mouse The farewellWilliam Wordsworth (1770-1850) Why art thou silent? Thoughts of a Briton on the subjugation of Switzerland It is a beauteous evening, calm and free On the extinction of the Venetian Republic O friend! I know not Surprised by joy To Toussaint L'ouverture With ships the sea was sprinkled The world Upon Westminster bridge, Sept. 3, 1802 When I have borne in memory Three years she grew The daffodils The solitary reaper Elegiac stanzas To H. C. 'Tis said that some have died for love The pet lamb Stepping westward The childless father Ode on intimations of immortalitySir Walter Scott (1771-1832) Proud Maisie A weary lot is thine The Maid of NeidpathSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Kubla Khan Youth and age The rime of the ancient marinerWalter Savage Landor (1775-1864) Rose Aylmer Epitaph Child of a dayThomas Campbell (1767-1844) Hohenlinden Earl MarchCharles Lamb (1775-1835) HesterAllan Cunningham (1784-1842) A wet sheet and a flowing seaGeorge Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1823) The Isles of GreecePercy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Hellas Wild with weeping To the night To a skylark To the moon The question The waning moon Ode to the west wind Rarely, rarely comest thou The invitation, to Jane The recollection Ode to heaven Life of life Autumn Stanzas written in dejection near Naples Dirge for the year A widow bird The two spiritsJohn Keats (1795-1821) La Belle Dame sans merci On first looking into Chapman's Homer To sleep The gentle south Last sonnet Ode to a nightingale Ode on a Grecian urn Ode to Autumn Ode to Psyche Ode to MelancholyHartley Coleridge (1796-1849) She is not fair ALICE MEYNELL'S COMMENTS/NOTES EPITHALAMION Written by Spensor on his marriage in Ireland, Elizabeth Boyle ofKilcoran, who survived him, married one Roger Seckerstone, and wasagain a widow. Dr. Grosart seems to have finally decided theidentity of the heroine of this great poem. It is worth while toexplain, once for all, that I do not use the accented e for thelonger pronunciation of the past participle. The accent is not anEnglish sign, and, to my mind, disfigures the verse; neither do Ithink it necessary to cut off the e with an apostrophe when theparticiple is shortened. The reader knows at a glance how the wordis to be numbered; besides, he may have his preferences wherechoice is allowed. In reading such a line as Tennyson's "Dear as remembered kisses after death, " one man likes the familiar sound of the word "remembered" as we allspeak it now; another takes pleasure in the four light syllablesfilling the line so full. Tennyson uses the apostrophe as a rule, but neither he nor any other author is quite consistent. ROSALYND'S MADRIGAL It may please the reader to think that this frolic, rich, anddelicate singer was Shakespeare's very Rosalind. From Dr. ThomasLodge's novel, Euphues' Golden Legacy, was taken much of the story, with some of the characters, and some few of the passages, of AsYou Like It. ROSALINE This splendid poem (from the same romance), written on the poet'svoyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, has the fireand freshness of the south and the sea; all its colours are clear. The reader's ear will at once teach him to read the sigh "heigh ho"so as to give the first syllable the time of two (long and short). FAREWELL TO ARMS George Peele's four fine stanzas (which must be mentioned asdedicated to Queen Elizabeth, but are better without thatdedication) exist in another form, in the first person, and withsome archaisms smoothed. But the third person seems to be far moretouching, the old man himself having done with verse. THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton. TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY The author of this exquisite song is by no means certain. Thesecond stanza is not with the first in Shakespeare, but it is inBeaumont and Fletcher. KIND ARE HER ANSWERS These verses are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musicianand poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himselfsweetly commended as "voluble, and fit to express any amorousconceit. " In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and thetrochaic movement of the short lines meet the contrary movement ofthe rest, with an exquisite effect of flux and reflux. The"dancers" whose time they sang must have danced (with Perdita) like"a wave of the sea. " DIRGE I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and lessbeautiful stanza. FOLLOW Campion's "airs, " for which he wrote his words, laid rules toourgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. Theairs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leaveto be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzasfor music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor varietythat a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campionbegan again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, forexample, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, "touching in its majesty"- "Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!" Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a joggingstanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes arespeechless, with these two final lines - "If speech be then the best of graces, Doe it not in slumber smother!" Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines. "Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me" is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a singlegloom in this - "Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!" And a single joy in this - "Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!" Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campionthe author of Cherry Ripe - "A thousand cherubim fly in her looks. " And yet "a thousand cherubim" is a line of a poem full of thedullest kind of reasoning--curious matter for music--and of theintricate knotting of what is a very simple thread of thought. Itwas therefore no easy matter to choose something of Campion's for acollection of the finest work. For an historical book ofrepresentative poetry the question would be easy enough, for thereCampion should appear by his glorious lyric, Cherry Ripe, by one ortwo poems of profounder imagination (however imperfect), and by amadrigal written for the music (however the stanzas may flag intheir quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics forthe sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity ofthe inspiration, and the poet's absolute disregard of the moment ofits flight and departure. A few splendid lines may be reasonenough for extracting a short poem, but must not be made to beartoo great a burden. WHEN THOU MUST HOME Of the quality of this imaginative lyric there is no doubt. It isfine throughout, as we confess even after the greatness of theopening:- "When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admired guest--" It is as solemn and fantastic at the close as at this dark andsplendid opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question;and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his Book of Airs with Rosseter two years before herdeath, it is by no violence that we give him the name that coversour earlier poets of the great age. When thou must Home is of theday of Marlowe. It has the qualities of great poetry, andespecially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and it has aquality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult, large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous. THE FUNERAL Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitationthat I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral;but the earlier lines of the last are fine. CHARIS' TRIUMPH The freshest of Ben Jonson's lyrics have been chosen. Obviously itis freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, hisemphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice inverse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless itis to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country-phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effectis ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault for ablunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, whereit says the contrary of what it would say - "But might I of Jove's nectar supI would not change for thine;" and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than theargument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they musthold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line ofit has chanced to get turned in the rhyming. IN EARTH "I ever saw anything, " says Charles Lamb, "like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father inthe Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of theearth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems toresolve itself into the element which it contemplates. " SONG (Phoebus, arise!) All Drummond's poems seem to be minor poems, even at their finest, except only this. He must have known, for the creation of thatpoem, some more impassioned and less restless hour. It is, fromthe outset to the close, the sigh of a profound expectation. Thereis no division into stanzas, because its metre is the breath oflife. One might wish that the English ode (roughly called"Pindaric") had never been written but with passion, for so writtenit is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the heart andthe breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It haspassed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (notastray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley, long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. ButDrummond's (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. Withadmirable judgment it was set up at the very gate of that GoldenTreasury we all know so well; and, therefore, generation aftergeneration of readers, who have never opened Drummond's poems, knowthis fine ode as well as they know any single poem in the whole ofEnglish literature. There was a generation that had not beentaught by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it. Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called thembeautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they mightsome day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry morecomplete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that anotherstanza might have made a final close; but a master's ode has theunity of life, and when it ends it ends for ever. A poem of Drummond's has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea hasblushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have causedher, one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool asthe very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the suddenincrease of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: "Fornaught thy cheeks that morn do raise. " What sweet, nay, whatsolemn roses! Again: "Me here she first perceived, and here a mornOf bright carnations overspread her face. " The seventeenth century has possession of that "morn" caught onceupon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch itsfreshness to wither it. TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone--not unique, for it had sounded somewhere in mediaeval poetry in Italy--but in adreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence againstinconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves somethinglike indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurelyjustified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region oftolerance and pardon. THE PULLEY An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisiteverses. George Herbert was maladroit in using the word "rest" intwo senses. "Peace" is not quite so characteristic a word, but itought to take the place of "rest" in the last line of the secondstanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not havethis rather distressing ambiguity. The poem is otherwise perfectbeyond description. MISERY George Herbert's work is so perfectly a box where thoughts"compacted lie, " that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours;nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovelypassage as this - "He was a garden in a Paradise. " THE ROSE There is nothing else of Waller's fine enough to be admitted here;and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic inwords and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of thethird-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of twokinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argumentof The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, fromRonsard to Herrick: "Time is short; they make the better bargainwho make haste to love. " This thrifty business and essentiallycold impatience was--time out of mind--unknown to the truer love;it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. Thepoets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry awarning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive thepaltry plea of the poet that time is brief--and that is thecharming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and theverse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief. L'ALLEGRO The sock represents the stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and thebuskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think thecomic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at thetragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and hiswood-notes wild. IL PENSEROSO It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian. Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written. LYCIDAS Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers ofpoetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthestnorth to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; "the great vision" means theapparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael's Mount;Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast;Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land's End. Arethusa and Mincius--Sicilian and Italian streams--represent thepastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. ON A PRAYER-BOOK "Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for abrilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of hisown verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, anddespite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line - "Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep, " and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintryword to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace, of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century--not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that noreader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on thatcompany of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gavenow and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purestand exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance ofCrashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance ofAddison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Popeand all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased tocall a "rage, " and this expatiated (to use another word of theirown) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not inthe seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, butin an eighteenth century "rage. " A "noble rage, " properlyprovoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy evertempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to runupon. He was fancy's child, and the bard of the eighteenth centurywas the child of common sense with straws in his hair--vainlyarranged there. The eighteenth century was never content with amoderate mind; it invented "rage"; it matched rage with a flagrantdiction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacantand ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to bebehind no century in passion--nay, to show the way, to fire thenations. Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, "where to rage"; and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind ofmisgiving as to the resulting verse. Take such a phrase as "themadded land"; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage asthe last century evoked it. "The madded land" is a phrase intendedto prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodgethe fury in his breast when opportunity occurred. "And dubioustitle shakes the madded land. " It would be hard to find anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair. Take The Weeper of Crashaw--his most flagrant poem. Its folliesare all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick andabundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with theflagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing thatgeneral sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I amtherefore shy even of citing the "brisk cherub" who has earlysipped the Saint's tear: "Then to his music, " in Crashaw'sdivinely simple phrase; and his singing "tastes of this breakfastall day long. " Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and whensorrow would be seen in state, "then is she drest by none butthee. " Then you come upon the fancy, "Fountain and garden in oneface. " All places, times, and objects are "Thy tears' sweetopportunity. " If these charming passages lurk in his worst poems, the reader of this anthology will not be able to count them in hisbest. In the Epiphany Hymn the heavens have found means 'To disinherit the sun's rise, Delicately to displaceThe day, and plant it fairer in thy face. " To the Morning: Satisfaction for Sleep, is, all through, luminous. It would be difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of thattime, more daylight or more spirit. True, an Elizabethan would nothave had poetry so rich as in Love's Horoscope, but yet anElizabethan would have had it no fresher. The Hymn to St. Teresahas the brevities which this poet--reproached with his longueurs--masters so well. He tells how the Spanish girl, six years old, setout in search of death: "She's for the Moors and Martyrdom. Sweet, not so fast!" Of many contemporary songs in pursuit of afugitive Cupid, Crashaw's Cupid's Cryer: out of the Greek, is themost dainty. But if readers should be a little vexed with thepoet's light heart and perpetual pleasure, with the late ripenessof his sweetness, here, for their satisfaction, is a passagecapable of the great age that had lately closed when Crashaw wrote. It is in his summons to nature and art: "Come, and come strong, To the conspiracy of our spacious song!" I have been obliged to take courage to alter the reading of theseventeenth and nineteenth lines of the Prayer-Book, so as to makethem intelligible; they had been obviously misprinted. I have alsofound it necessary to re-punctuate generally. WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly throwntogether that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedomwith it. I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzasthat repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious. ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that, better known, On the Death of Mr. William Harvey. In the Crashawode, and in the Hymn to the Light, Cowley is, at last, tender. Butit cannot be said that his love-poems had tenderness. Be wrote ina gay language, but added nothing to its gaiety. He wrote thelanguage of love, and left it cooler than he found it. What theconceits of Lovelace and the rest-- flagrant, not frigid--did notdo was done by Cowley's quenching breath; the language of lovebegan to lose by him. But even then, even then, who could haveforetold what the loss at a later day would be! HYMN TO THE LIGHT It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should showCowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into twolines. For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used)the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separateunit of metre. He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at leasthe first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroicverse; and after him Dryden took possession and then Pope. Butboth these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in theFrench manner, divided. Cowley, however, with admirable art, isable to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of hisline fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in thespeaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by anylingering. Take this one instance - "Like some fair pine o'erlooking all the ignobler wood. " If Cowley's delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and hesurely had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrinewould have taken its own place as an important line of Englishmetre, more mobile than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramaticpoetry, but a line liberally lyrical. It would have been thelight, pursuing wave that runs suddenly, outrunning twenty, furtherup the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longerimpulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowleyleft the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if hisexample had been followed, English prosody would have had in this avaluable bequest. Cowley probably was two or three years younger than RichardCrashaw, and the alexandrine is to be found--to be found bysearching--in Crashaw; and he took precisely the same care asCowley that the long wand of that line should not give way in themiddle--should be strong and supple and should last. Here are fourof his alexandrines - "Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise. ""Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more. ""And everlasting series of a deathless song. ""To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name. " A later poet--Coventry Patmore--wrote a far longer line than eventhese--a line not only speeding further, but speeding with a morecelestial movement than Cowley or Crashaw heard with the ear ofdreams. "He unhappily adopted, " says Dr. Johnson as to Cowley's diction, "that which was predominant. " "That which was predominant" was asgood a vintage of English language as the cycles of history haveever brought to pass. TO LUCASTA Colonel Richard Lovelace, an enchanting poet, is hardly read, except for two poems which are as famous as any in our language. Perhaps the rumour of his conceits has frightened his reader. Itmust be granted they are now and then daunting; there is a poem on"Princess Louisa Drawing" which is a very maze; the little paths ofverse and fancy turn in upon one another, and the turns are pointedwith artificial shouts of joy and surprise. But, again, what areader unused to a certain living symbolism will be apt to take fora careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a rapture--none graver, none more fiery or more luminous. But even to name the poem wherethese occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry over tothe general sense of humour, which one distrusts. Nor is Lovelaceeasy reading at any time (the two or three famous poems excepted). The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the fiddler. Eleven o'clock in the morning was as good an hour as another for adance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate withfigures. It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of themovement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a freeimpulse. Since the first day danced with the first night, nodancing was more natural--at least to a dancer of genius. True, the dance could be tyrannous. It was an importunate fashion. Whenthe Bishop of Hereford, compelled by Robin Hood, in merryBarnsdale, danced in his boots ("and glad he could so get away"), he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a seventeenth centuryauthor here and there whose original seriousness or work-a-daypiety would have been content to go plodding flat-foot or halting, as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune, the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetualmeasure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to resthis wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flighthas lost its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyanturchins--naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenthcentury was in love with that old fancy--more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past. Its late painters, whose humanfigures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kepta sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept theangels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make aflock of birds flutter up. Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace'spoetry: "This is the palace of the wood, And court o' the royal oak, where stoodThe whole nobility. " In more than one place Lucasta's, or Amarantha's, or Laura's hairis sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as inWordsworth's line. Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow abook; yet it is but a "hermitage. " To shake out the light andspirit of its leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him, but to the world. In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, "you" to"thou. " Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and theinconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else sodistressing as in this brief and otherwise perfect poem. The faultis easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lendhim this redress, offered him here as an act of comradeship. LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the morelamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that dependupon the precision of a comma--nay, upon the precision of the voicein reading. Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem that makes akind of dainty confusion between the two vestals--the living andthe dead; they are "equal virgins, " and you must assign thepronouns carefully to either as you read. This, read twice, mustsurely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings. Itis a joy to meet such a phrase as "her brave eyes. " TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight. Should they be "birds" or "gods" that wanton in the air in thefirst of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at "gods, " andwith admirable judgment suggested "birds, " an amendment adopted bythe greater number of succeeding editors, until one or two wishedfor the other phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace. Butthe Bishop's misgiving was after all justified by one of the Mss. Of the poem, in which the "gods" proved to be "birds" long beforehe changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choosebetween birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with"gods" would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace ledfrom birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels. "When linnet-like confined" is another modern reading. "When, likecommitted linnets, " daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored;happily, because Lovelace would not have the word "confined" twicein this little poem. A HORATIAN ODE "He earned the glorious name, " says a biographer of Andrew Marvell(editing an issue of that poet's works which certainly has itsfaults), "of the British Aristides. " The portly dulness of themind that could make such a phrase, and having made, award it, isnot, in fairness, to affect a reader's thought of Marvell himselfnor even of his time. Under correction, I should think that theaward was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve ofthe day that cumbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burdenand made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell's politicalrectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a robustious kind; buthis poetry, at its rare best, has a "wild civility, " which mightpuzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success ofthis phrase of the "British Aristides. " Nay, it is difficult notto think that Marvell too, who was "of middling stature, roundish-faced, cherry-cheeked, " a healthy and active rather than aspiritual Aristides, might himself have been somewhat taken bysurprise at the encounters of so subtle a muse. He, as a garden-poet, expected the accustomed Muse to lurk about the fountain-heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the statues of thegods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century convention inwhich there were certainly no surprises. And for fear of thecommonplaces of those visits, Marvell sometimes outdoes the wholecompany of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy. Thereader treads with him a "maze" most resolutely intricate, and ismore than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzledon the way to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought. And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardlylooked for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had beenwaiting behind a laurel or an apple-tree. You find him coming awayfrom such a divine ambush a wilder and a simpler man. All hisgarden had been made ready for poetry, and poetry was indeed there, but in unexpected hiding and in a strange form, looking rather likea fugitive, shy of the poet who was conscious of having her rulesby heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen, for all her haste. The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of adifferent character and a higher degree. They have so muchauthentic dignity that "the glorious name of the British Aristides"really seems duller when it is conferred as the earnings of theHoratian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland than when itinappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell, cherry-cheeked, caught inthe tendrils of his vines and melons. He shall be, therefore, theBritish Aristides in those moments of midsummer solitude; at least, the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never sought. The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinatelength. The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes theutmost of the fun to be easily found in the physical facts of thecountry whose people "with mad labour fished the land to shore. "The Satire on "Flecno" makes the utmost of another joke we know of--that of famine. Flecno, it will be remembered, was a poet, andpoor; but the joke of his bad verses was hardly needed, so finedoes Marvell find that of his hunger. Perhaps there is no age ofEnglish satire that does not give forth the sound of that laughterunknown to savages--that craven laughter. THE PICTURE OF T. C. IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS The presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the suresign of the visit of that unlooked-for muse. With all spirit andsubtlety does Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T. C. (thefuture "virtuous enemy of man") the prophetic homage of thehabitual poets. The poem closes with an impassioned tenderness notto be found elsewhere in Marvell. THE DEFINITION OF LOVE The noble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, highor low, throughout Marvell's book, it we except one single splendidand surpassing passage from The Definition of Love - "Magnanimous despair aloneCould show me so divine a thing. " CHILDHOOD One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with thefull spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few butstudents until Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition. The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw's lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banishedinto life. Vaughan's imagination suddenly opens a new windowtowards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is oneof the most incredible of all facts that there should be more thana century--and such a century!--from him to Wordsworth. Thepassing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing ofPope, Prior, and Gray--of the world, the world, whether reasonableor flippant or rhetorical--is more strange. Vaughan's phrase anddiction seem to carry the light. Il vous semble que cette femmedegage de la lumiere en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in LesMiserables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense oflight that we know the muse we are to love. SCOTTISH BALLADS It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative balladsfrom among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged withthin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among thefinest, those that had passages of genius--a line here and there ofsurpassing imagination and poetry--rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that arethroughout on the level of the highest of their kind. "None but myfoe to be my guide" so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; theexquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher's Well;its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken byMargaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret;and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as thatbeginning, "I saw the new moon late yestreen, " the stanza beginning"O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords, " and almost all thestanzas following. A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing qualitythroughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson's version ofFair Annie, for Edom o' Gordon, for The Daemon Lover, for Edward, Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne. MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW This most majestic ode--one of the few greatest of its kind--is amodel of noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it wholewould be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this bookis made in the midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far fromsimplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said somethingfine, caps it with something foolish. The suppressed part of theode is silly with a silliness which Dryden's age chose to dodder inwhen it would. The deplorable "rattling bones" of the closingsection has a touch of it. SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR It is a futile thing--and the cause of a train of futilities--tohail "style" as though it were a separable quality in literature, and it is not in that illusion that the style of the opening ofAphra Behn's resounding song is to be praised. But it IS thestyle--implying the reckless and majestic heart--that first takesthe reader of these great verses. HYMN (The spacious firmament on high) Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not, --and it seems thatthe inspired passages are none of his--it is to me a poem ofgenius, magical in spite of the limited diction. ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY Also in spite of limited diction--the sign of thought closing in, as it did fast close in during those years--are Pope's tendernessand passion communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not betoo much to say that all his passion, all his tenderness, andcertainly all his mystery, are in the few lines at the opening andclose. The Epistle of Eloisa is (artistically speaking) but acounterfeit. Yet Pope's Elegy begins by stealing and translatinginto the false elegance of altered taste that lovely and poeticopening of Ben Jonson's - "What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?" All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost insuch a change as Pope makes - "What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shadeInvites my steps, and points to yonder glade?" Yet they are not lost. Pope's awe and ardour are authentic, andthey prevail; the succeeding couplet--inimitably modulated, and oftragic dignity--proves, without delay, the quality of the poem. The poverty and coldness of the passage (towards the end), in whichthe roses and the angels are somewhat trivially sung, cannot mar soveritable an utterance. The four final couplets are the very gloryof the English couplet. LINE ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE Cowper, again, by the very directness of human feeling makes hisnarrowing English a means of absolutely direct communication. Ofall his works (and this is my own mere and unshared opinion) thissingle one deserves immortality. LIFE This fragment (the only fragment, properly so called, in thepresent collection) so pleased Wordsworth that he wished he hadwritten the lines. They are very gently touched. THE LAND OF DREAMS When Blake writes of sleep and dreams he writes under the veryinfluence of the hours of sleep--with a waking consciousness of thewilder emotion of the dream. Corot painted so, when at summer dawnhe went out and saw landscape in the hours of sleep. SURPRISED BY JOY It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth's sonnets--thegreatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warneditors how they print this one sonnet; "I wished to share thetransport" is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history ofthe variant I have not looked. It is enough that all thesuddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned lines arelost by that "wished" in the place of "turned. " The loss would bethe less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in thatheart-moving poem, 'Tis said that some have died for love, isWordsworth to be confessed as an impassioned poet. STEPPING WESTWARD This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far morejustified, more recollected and sincere than is that moremonumental composition, the famous poem of sympathy, Hartleap Well. The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebukedby the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles tothe straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world. Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, hadthere broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass wouldnot grow, nor shade linger there - "This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine. " And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be thesearid woodland ruins--cruelly, because the common sight of the dayblossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made lesstolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benignbeauty of this stanza especially - "The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential careFor the unoffending creature whom He loves. " We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof ofthat "reverential care, " the visible alteration of nature at thescene of suffering--an alteration we are obliged to dispense withevery day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whetherWordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--upon suchgrounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of nomore than a fictitious sign or a false proof? To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very largemeshes--so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless causethe reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not onlysupremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian. YOUTH AND AGE Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan--a poem that wrests the secretof dreams and brings it to the light of verse--I place Youth andAge as the best specimen of Coleridge's poetry that is quiteundelirious--to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate hisundelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as itis, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tendernessof some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; thelikeness to "some poor nigh-related guest" with the three linesthat follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extremepoetry--the simplest "flower of the mind, " the most single magic--than any other in our language. But the reader must be permittedto call the story silly. Page 265 (Are those her ribs through which the Sun) Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses themwhen the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. Itis a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when heimpossibly placed a star WITHIN the tip of the crescent. Page 266 (I feer thee, ancient Mariner!) The likeness of "the ribbed sea sand" is said to be the one passageactually composed by Wordsworth, --who according to the first planshould have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge--"andperhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem, " adds one criticafter another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothingwhatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality. Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of thesenses, which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simplepoet. It is necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on"the moving Moon" at the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to thesupernatural stanzas on page 271; and, for touch, to the line - "And still my body drank. " ROSE AYLMER Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfectstanzas. THE ISLES OF GREECE One really fine and poetic stanza--of course, the third; threestanzas that are good eloquence--the fourth, fifth, and seventh;and one that is a fair bit of argument--the tenth--may togetherperhaps carry the rest. HELLAS The profounder spirit of Shelley's poem yet leaves it a carelesspiece of work in comparison with Byron's. The two false rhymes atthe outset may not be of great importance, but there is somethingannoying in the dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza. Dissyllabic rhymes are beautiful and enriching when they fall inthe right place; that is, where there is a pause for the secondlittle syllable to stand. For example, they could not be betterplaced than they would have been at the end of the shorter lines ofthis same stanza, where they would have dropped into a part of thepause. Another sin of sheer heedlessness--the lapse of grammar inThe Skylark, at the top of page 296 (With thy clear keen joyance)--will remind the reader of the special habitual error of Drummond ofHawthornden. THE WANING MOON In these few lines the Shelley spirit seems to be more intense thanin any other passage as brief. ODE TO THE WEST WIND This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great poseswritings, and one of the most splendid poems on nature and onpoetry in a literature resounding with odes on these enormousthemes. THE INVITATION No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucentverse. LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI Keats is here the magical poet, as he is the intellectual poet inthe great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise ofboth imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In hisday they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in hispoetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, andsimplicity, and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keatswas to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all that infact he was. ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the mostperfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urnis the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea--theemptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the taleof the antique urn--is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy--aprank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines inwhich this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in allliterature: the "little town, " the "peaceful citadel, "--were eversimple adjectives more happy? But John Keats's final moral here isundeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The Odeto Autumn is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovelyand perfect. The Psyche I love the least, because its fancy israther weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of thedeadly sickliness of Endymion. None the less does it remain justwithin the group of the really fine odes of English poets. Theeloquent Melancholy more narrowly escapes exclusion from thatgroup.