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Here be, without duck or nod,

Other trippings to be trod

Of lighter toes, and such court guise
As Mercury did first devise,
With the mincing Dryades,

On the lawns, and on the leas.1

[This second Song presents them to their Father and Mother.]

Noble lord, and lady bright,

I have brought ye new delight;
Here behold, so goodly grown,

Three fair branches of

your own;

Heaven hath timely tried their youth, Their faith, their patience, and their truth, And sent them here through hard assays With a crown of deathless praise,

To triumph in victorious dance

O'er sensual folly and intemperance.

[The dances ended, the SPIRIT epiloguises.

SPIRIT.

To the ocean now I fly,2

And those happy climes that lie
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the sky:
There I suck the liquid air
All amidst the gardens fair

Of Hesperus, and his daughters three,
That sing about the golden tree:
Along the crispéd shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund Spring,
The Graces, and the rosy-bosomed Hours,
Thither all their bounties bring:

There eternal Summer dwells,

And west winds, with musky wing,

About the cedarn alleys fling

Nard and cassia's balmy smells.
Iris there with humid bow

Waters the odorous banks, that blow

1 Pastures, corn-fields.

2 A paraphrase of Ariel's song in the "Tempest: "

"Where the bee sucks, there lurk I."

Flowers of more mingled hue
Than her purfled1 scarf can shew,
And drenches with Elysian dew
List, mortals, if your ears be true)
Beds of hyacinth and roses,
Where young Adonis oft reposes,
Waxing well of his deep wound
In slumber soft, and on the ground
Sadly sits the Assyrian queen;2
But far above, in spangled sheen,
Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced,
Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranced,
After her wandering labours long,
Till free consent the gods among
Make her his eternal bride,
And from her fair unspotted side
Two blissful twins are to be born,
Youth and Joy; so Jove hath sworn.
But now my task is smoothly done;
I can fly, or I can run

Quickly to the green earth's end,

Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend,
And from thence can soar as soon

To the corners of the moon.

Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free:
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her.

1 Flourished, embroided with the needle.

2 Venus, so called, because she was first worshipped by the Assy. rians.

3 "Comus," observes Hallam," was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling, that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different school from his contemporaries. Many of them had produced highly beautiful and imaginative passages; but none had evinced so classical a judgment, none had aspired to so regular a perfection. Jonson had learned much from the ancients, but there was a grace in their best models which he did not quite attain. Neither his 'Sad Shepherd,' nor the 'Faithful Shepherdess' of Fletcher, have the elegance or dignity of 'Comus.' A noble virgin and her young brothers, by whom this masque was originally represented, required an elevation, a purity, a sort of severity of sentiment which no one in that age could have given but Milton. He avoided, and nothing loth, the more festive notes which dramatic poetry was

XVII

LYCIDAS.

[In this monody the author bewails a learned friend, Mr. Edward King, who was unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637, and by occasion foretels the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height.]

YET Once more, O ye laurels! and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

wont to mingle with its serious strain. But for this he was compensated by the brightest hues of fancy, and the sweetest melody of song. In 'Comus' we find nothing prosaic or feeble, no false taste in the incidents, and not much in the language, nothing over which we should desire to pass on a second perusal. The want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to the imagination."

1 "It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test of real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or perhaps we might say most readers, do not taste its excellence; nor does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or even Virgil and Homer. It is, however, somewhat remarkable, that Johnson, who has committed his critical reputation by the most contemp tuous depreciation of this poem, had, in an earlier part of his life, selected the tenth Eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise; the tenth Eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same class of pastoral

Begin then, sisters, of the sacred well,1

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse,

So may some gentle muse

With lucky words favour my destined urn,
And, as he passes, turn

And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud:
For we were nursed upon the self-same bill,
Fed the same flock by fountain, shade, and rill.
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn,
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the star that rose, at evening, bright,

Toward Heaven's descent had sloped his westering3 wheel Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,

Tempered to the oaten flute;

Rough satyrs danced, and fauns with cloven heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long,
And old Damætas loved to hear our song.

But oh, the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Thee, shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.

The willows, and the hazel copses green,

and personal allegory, and requires the same sacrifice of reasoning criticism, as the Lycidas itself. In the age of Milton, the poetical world had been accustomed by the Italian and Spanish writers to a more abundant use of allegory than has been pleasing to their posterity; but Lycidas is not so much in the nature of an allegory as of a masque; the characters pass before our eyes in imagination, as on the stage; they are chiefly mythological, but not creations of the poet. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress; but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination that produce no emotion in the heart; or none at least, except through associations independent of the subject."-Hallam.

1 Fountain.

2 So the muse is made masculine in Samson Agonistes, ver. 973. 3 Drawing towards the west.

4 He probably means Dr. William Chappel, who had been tutor to them both, and afterwards became Bishop of Cork and Ross.

Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,
When first the white-thorn blows;

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherds' ear.

Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie;
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona1 high,

Nor yet where Deva2 spreads her wizard stream:
Ay me! I fondly dream

Had ye been there, for what could that have done?
What could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The mus herself for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,

When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
Alas! what boots it with incessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days,
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,”
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears;

66

66

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed."

The Isle of Anglesea.

2 The River Dee. The word Deva is supposed to mean divine.

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