MELANCHOLY. BY BEAUMONT. Hence, all you vain delights, Wherein you spend your folly; Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes; Fountain heads and pathless groves, These are the sounds we feed upon: Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley; 2" Lovely Melancholy."-Tradition has given these verses to Beaumont, though they appeared for the first time in a play of Fletcher's after the death of his friend. In all probability Beaumont had partly sketched the play, and left the verses to be inserted. I cannot help thinking that a couplet has been lost after the words "bats and owls." It is true the four verses ending with those words might be made to belong to the preceding four, as among the things "welcomed ;" but the junction would be forced, and the modulation injured. They may remain, too, where they are, as combining to suggest the "sounds" which the melancholy man feeds upon; "fountain-heads" being audible, "groves" whispering, and the "moonlight walks" being attended by the hooting "owl." They also modulate beautifully in this case. Yet these intimations themselves appear a little forced; whereas, supposing a couplet to be supplied, there would be a distinct reference to melancholy sights, as well as sounds. The conclusion is divine. Indeed the whole poem, as Hazlitt says, is "the perfection of this kind of writing." Orpheus might have hung it, like a pearl, in the ear of Proserpina. It has naturally been thought to have suggested the Penseroso to Milton, and is more than worthy to have done so; for fine as that is, it is still finer. It is the concentration of a hundred melancholies. Sir Walter Scott, in one of his biographical works, hardly with the accustomed gallantry and good-nature of the great novelist, contrasted it with the "melo-dramatic" abstractions of Mrs. Radclyffe (then living). He might surely, with more justice, have opposed it to the diffuseness and conventional phraseology of "novels in verse.' 1" Places which pale passion loves."-Beaumont, while writing this verse, perhaps the finest in the poem, probably had in his memory that of Marlowe, in his description of Tamburlaine. Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion. A SATYR PRESENTS A BASKET OF FRUIT TO THE BY FLETCHER. Here be grapes whose lusty blood Sweeter yet did never crown The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown Than the squirrel's teeth that crack them; Deign, oh, fairest fair! to take them. For these black-eyed Dryope Hath oftentimes commanded me With my clasped knee to climb: See how well the lusty time Hath deck'd their rising cheeks in red, Such as on your lips is spread. Here be berries for a queen, Some be red-some be green ;3 These are of that luscious meat The great god Pan himself doth eat; I freely offer; and ere long Will bring you more, more sweet and strong; Least the great Pan do awake That sleeping lies in a deep glade, I must go, I must run, Swifter than the fiery sun 3" Some be red, some be green."-This verse calls to mind a beautiful one of Chaucer, in his description of a grove in spring : In which were oakès great, straight as a line, Coleridge was fond of repeating it. The Flower and the Leaf. 4" That sleeping lies," &c.-Pan was not to be waked too soon with impunity. Ου θεμις, ω ποιμαν, το μεσαμβρινον, ου θεμις αμιν Theocritus, Idyll i., v. 15. No, shepherd, no; we must not pipe at noon : With quivering nostril. What a true picture of the half-goat divinity! A SPOT FOR LOVE TALES. Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells; For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love; MORNING. See, the day begins to break, And the light shoots like a streak Of subtle fire. The wind blows cold I have departed from my plan for once, to introduce this very small extract, partly for the sake of its beauty, partly to show the student that great poets do not confine their pleasant descriptions to images or feelings pleasing in the commoner sense of the word, but include such as, while seeming to contradict, harmonize with them, upon principles of truth, and of a genial and strenuous sympathy. The "subtle streak of fire" is obviously beautiful, but the addition of the cold wind is a truth welcome to those only who have strength as well as delicacy of apprehension, or rather, that healthy delicacy which arises from the strength. Sweet and wholesome, and to be welcomed, is the chill breath of morning. There is a fine epithet for this kind of dawn in the elder Marston's Antonio and Melida :— Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn, that flakes THE POWER OF LOVE. Hear, ye ladies that despise What the mighty Love has done; To deceive the hopes of man, Where no love was, loved a shower.5 Hear, ye ladies that are coy, What the mighty Love can do, Fear the fierceness of the boy: The chaste moon he makes to woo; Vesta, kindling holy fires, Circled round about with spies, Never dreaming loose desires, Doting at the altar dies; He can build, and once more fire. "Where no love was."-See how extremes meet, and passion writes as conceit does, in these repetitions of a word : Where no love was, lov'd a shower. : So, still more emphatically, in the instance afterwards : Fear the fierceness of the boy than which nothing can be finer. Wonder and earnestness conspire to stamp the iteration of the sound. |