AN ODE UPON A QUESTION MOVED WHETHER LOVE SHOULD CONTINUE FOR EVER. Having interr'd her Infant-birth The watery ground that late did mourn The well-accorded birds did sing Their hymns unto the pleasant time, To which, soft whistles of the wind, When with a love none can express Melander and Celinda fair, The season with their loves did bless. Long their fix'd eyes to Heaven bent When with a sweet though troubled look Or never had beginning took.' Then with a look, it seem'd, denied 'O no, Belov'd, I am most sure Else should our souls in vain elect, Nor here on earth then, nor above, These eyes again thine eyes shall see, For if no use of sense remain When bodies once this life forsake, Or they could no delight partake, Why should they ever rise again? And if every imperfect mind Make love the end of knowledge here, How perfect will our love be where All imperfection is refin'd. Let then no doubt, Celinda, touch, So when from hence we shall be gone, Each shall be both, yet both but one. UPON COMBING HER HAIR. Breaking from under that thy cloudy veil, Open and shine yet more, shine out more clear, Thou glorious, golden beam of darling hair, Even till my wonder-stricken senses fail. Shine out in light, and shine those rays on far, Thou much more fair than is the Queen of Love When she doth comb her on her sphere above, And from a planet turns a blazing star. Nay, thou art greater too, more destiny Depends on thee, than on her influence; No hair thy fatal hand doth now dispense But to some one a thread of life must be. While gracious unto me, thou both dost sunder Might have amazed sense, and shew'st each hair But stay, methinks new beauties do arise While she withdraws these glories which were spread; Wonder of beauties, set thy radiant head, And strike out day from thy yet fairer eyes. SANDYS, HERBERT, CRASHAW, VAUGHAN. [GEORGE SANDYS, son of Archbishop Sandys, was born 1577, and died 1643. Set out for the East 1616. Published translation of Ovid 1626; the Psalms 1636; other paraphrases 1638 and 1641.] [GEORGE HERBERT, born 1592-3, died 1634. He was Public Orator at Cambridge from 1619 to 1627, and was Rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire in 1631. His poems were first published 1633.] [RICHARD CRASHAW, born 1615 (?); expelled from Cambridge 1644; became a Roman Catholic. Published Steps to the Altar 1646, and died canon of Loretto 1650.] [HENRY VAUGHAN, born 1621-2, died 1695. Published Secular Poems 1646; Olor Iscanus 1651; Silex Scintillans, part 1, 1650, part 2, 1656; Thalia Rediviva 1678.] Poets are never independent of circumstances: Sandys, the only one of the four whose names stand at the head of this section who escaped the epidemic of conceits which ran its course in the first half of the seventeenth century, was the only one who had a full and successful life. He too was the only one who could write smooth, clear and vigorous verse, an accomplishment which requires perfect self-possession, or overmastering inspiration, or good models. Sandys wrote before Waller and Denham as well as the average versifiers who came after Dryden. His classical translations are not equal to his scriptural paraphrases, and if he had finished the Æneid Dryden would have left it alone. Like Dryden he did his best work late he was fifty-nine when he published the Psalms. It does not do to compare Sandys with the authorised version of the Bible. Wherever the original is peculiarly striking he is disappointing: he gives his reader no such compensation for his temerity as Sternhold's version of the Theophany in the 18th Psalm or the close of the 24th, or as Watts's equally well-known paraphrase of the 90th. Even Tate and Brady at their best, as in the 139th Psalm, come very near to Sandys' highest level; but he is much more equable; he never subsides, like Sternhold and Hopkins, into doggerel; he never subsides, like Tate and Brady, into diffuse platitudes. He always grasps the meaning for himself; he seems to work, if not always from the Hebrew, from an ancient version, and he sometimes exhibits a really masterly power of condensation, as in the 119th and the 150th Psalms. Apart from the strictly relative praise due to the versification, the paraphrase on Job is appallingly tame. The sacred poetry of Sandys was the dignified amusement of the evening of a successful life, whose morn had been spent in eastern travel and in colonial enterprise, without a trace of the internal struggles which form the staple of the poetry of Herbert. The Temple is the enigmatical history of a difficult resignation; it is full of the author's baffled ambition and his distress, now at the want of a sphere for his energies, now at the fluctuations of spirit, the ebb and flow of intellectual activity, natural to a temperament as frail as it was eager. There is something a little feverish and disproportioned in his passionate heart-searchings. The facts of the case lie in a nutshell. Herbert was a younger son of a large family; he lost his father early, and his mother, a devout, tender, imperious woman, decided, partly out of piety and partly out of distrust of his power to make his own way in the world, that he should be provided for in the Church. When he was twenty-six he was appointed Public Orator at Cambridge, and hoped to make this position a stepping-stone to employment at court. After eight years his patrons and his mother were dead, and he made up his mind to settle down with a wife on the living of Bemerton, where he died after a short but memorable incumbency of three years. The flower of his poetry seems to belong to the two years of acute crisis which preceded his installation at Bemerton or to the Indian summer of content when he imagined that his failure as a courtier was a prelude to his success in the higher character of a country parson. The well-known poem on Sunday, which he sang to his lute so near the end, and the quaint poem on the ideal priest, which we extract, may date from Bemerton. The Quip and The Collar may date from the years of crisis. Still, much, like the poems on VOL. II. |