As Time or Fortune could not rust; And crown'd thy name Whilst the shrill voice of Fame Spread wide thy beauty and my truth. This thou hast lost, For all true lovers, when they find And none will lay But such as would betray Thy faith to faiths as false as thine. Yet, if thou choose On such thy freedom to bestow, Affection may excuse, For love from sympathy doth flow. Note on Anacreon. [The following piece is a translation by Stanley from a poem by St Amant, in which that writer had employed his utmost genius to expand and enforce one of the over-free sentiments of the bard of Teios.] Let's not rhyme the hours away; To more ravishing delights. Let's give o'er this fool Apollo, Nor his fiddle longer follow: Fie upon his forked hill, With his fiddle-stick and quill; And the Muses, though they're gamesome, Are a mere poetic madness: Pegasus is but a horse; He that follows him is worse. See, the rain soaks to the skin, By the healths with which th' art crown'd; By thy numerous victories; By the howls by Monads made; By this haut-gout carbonade; By thy language cabalistic; By thy cymbal, drum, and his stick ; By the tunes thy quart-pots strike up ; By this sweet, this fresh and free air; By thy goat, as chaste as we are; Knights of the deep bowl install us ; Never let it want for wine. Note to Moschus. [Stanley here translates a poem of Marino, in which that writer had in his eye the second idyl of Moschus.] Along the mead Europa walks, To choose the fairest of its gems, When deathless Amaranth, this strife, Doth from that touch enamour'd rise, Clitia, to new devotion won, Doth now her former faith deny, Sees in her face a double sun, And glories in apostacy. The Gillyflower, which mocks the skies, And richer scarlet from her cheeks. As represented now in fire. The Crocus, who would gladly claim Awak'd by this approaching morn, But for their kind death humbly call, The royal maid th' applause disdains SIR JOHN DENHAM. SIR JOHN DENHAM (1615-1668) was the son of the chief baron of exchequer in Ireland, but was educated at Oxford, then the chief resort of all the poetical and high-spirited cavaliers. Denham was wild and dissolute in his youth, and squandered away great part of his patrimony at the gaming-table. He was made governor of Farnham castle by Charles I.; and after the monarch had been delivered into the hands of the army, his secret correspondence was partly carried on by Denham, who was furnished with nine several ciphers for the purpose. Charles had a respect for literature, as well as the arts; and Milton records of him that he made Shakspeare's plays the closet-companion of his solitude. It would appear, however, that the king wished to keep poetry apart from state affairs: for he told Denham, on seeing one of his pieces, that when men are young, and have little else to do, they may vent the overflowings of their fancy in that way; but when they are thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it looked as if they minded not the way to any better.' The poet stood corrected and bridled in his muse. In 1648 Denham conveyed the Duke of York to France, and resided in that country some time. His estate was sold by the Long Parliament; but the Restoration revived his fallen dignity and fortunes. He was made surveyor of the king's buildings, and a knight of the bath. In domestic life the poet does not seem to have been happy. He had freed himself from his early excesses and follies, but an unfortunate marriage darkened his closing years, which were unhappily visited by insanity. He recovered, to receive the congratulations of Butler, his fellowpoet, and to commemorate the death of Cowley, in one of his happiest effusions. Cooper's Hill, the poem by which Denham is now best known, consists of between three and four hundred lines, written in the heroic couplet. The descriptions are interspersed with sentimental digressions, suggested by the objects around-the river Thames, a ruined abbey, Windsor forest, and the field of Runnymede. The view from Cooper's Hill is rich and luxuriant, but the muse of Denham was more reflective than descriptive. Dr Johnson assigns to this poet the praise of being the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.' Ben Jonson's fine poem on Penshurst may dispute the palm of originality on this point with the Cooper's Hill,' but Jonson could not have written with such correctness, or with such intense and pointed expression, as Denham. The versification of this poet is generally smooth and flowing, but he had no pretensions to the genius of Cowley, or to the depth and delicacy of feeling possessed by the old dramatists, or the poets of the Elizabethan period. He reasoned fluently in verse, without glaring faults of style, and hence obtained the approbation of Dr Johnson far above his deserts. Denham could not, like his contemporary, Chamberlayne, have described the beauty of a summer morning The morning hath not lost her virgin blush, By a full quire of feather'd choristers, Plaited with valleys, and emboss'd with hills Chamberlayne is comparatively unknown, and has never been included in any edition of the poets, yet every reader of taste or sensibility must feel that the above picture far transcends the cold sketches of Denham, and is imbued with a poetical spirit to which he was a stranger. That Sir John Denham began a reformation in our verse,' says Southey, is one of the most groundless assertions that ever obtained belief in literature. More thought and more skill had been exercised before his time in the construction of English metre than he ever bestowed on the * Chamberlayne's Love's Victory.' 321 21 subject, and by men of far greater attainments, and far higher powers. To improve, indeed, either upon the versification or the diction of our great writers was impossible; it was impossible to exceed them in the knowledge or in the practice of their art, but it was easy to avoid the more obvious faults of inferior authors: and in this way he succeeded, just so far as not to be included in Which shade and shelter from the hill derives, The four lines printed in Italics have been praised [The Reformation-Monks and Puritans.] The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; nor consigned to oblivion with the "persons of qua lity" who contributed their vapid effusions to the miscellanies of those days. His proper place is among those of his contemporaries and successors who called themselves wits, and have since been entitled poets by the courtesy of England.'* Denham, nevertheless, deserves a place in English literature, Here should my wonder dwell, and here my praise, though not that high one which has heretofore been But my fix'd thoughts my wandering eye betrays. assigned to him. The traveller who crosses the Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late Alps or Pyrenees finds pleasure in the contrast af- A chapel crown'd, till in the common fate forded by level plains and calm streams, and so Den- Th' adjoining abbey fell. May no such storm ham's correctness pleases, after the wild imaginations Fall on our times, where ruin must reform! and irregular harmony of the greater masters of the Tell me, my muse, what monstrous dire offence, lyre who preceded him. In reading him, we feel that What crime could any Christian king incense we are descending into a different scene-the ro-To such a rage? Was't luxury or lust? mance is over, and we must be content with smoothness, regularity, and order. [The Thames and Windsor Forest.] [From Cooper's Hill."] My eye, descending from the hill, surveys Though with those streams he no remembrance hold, The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil, Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, * But his proud head the airy mountain hides *Southey's Cowper, vol. ii. p. 130. Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just? Were these their crimes? They were his own much more; But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor, In empty, airy contemplation dwell; Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance Denham had just and enlightened notions of the duty of a translator. It is not his business alone,' he says, 'to translate language into language, but poesy into poesy; and poesy is so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the translation, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum; there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words.' Hence, in his poetical address to Sir Richard Fanshawe, on his translation of Pastor Fido,' our poet says That servile path thou nobly dost decline 322 That in the Muses' garden grew, And amongst wither'd laurels threw. None knows which bears the happiest share; He melted not the ancient gold, His modest fancy kept in awe. Song to Morpheus. [From the Sophy,' Act v.] Morpheus, the humble god, that dwells In cottages and smoky cells, Hates gilded roofs and beds of down; And, though he fears no prince's frown, Flies from the circle of a crown. Come, I say, thou powerful god, And thy leaden charming rod, Dipt in the Lethean lake, O'er his wakeful temples shake, Lest he'should sleep and never wake. Nature, alas! why art thou so Obliged to thy greatest foe? Yet of death it bears a taste, And both are the same thing at last. Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Old Chaucer, like the morning star, His light those mists and clouds dissolv'd That pluck'd the fairest sweetest flower WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE. WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE (1619-1689) describes himself in the title-page to his works as of Shaftesbury, in the county of Dorset.' The poet practised as a physician at Shaftesbury; but he appears to have wielded the sword as well as the lancet, for he was present among the royalists at the battle of Newbury. His circumstances must have been far from flourishing, as, like Vaughan, he complains keenly of the poverty of poets, and states that he was debarred from the society of the wits of his day. The works of Chamberlayne consist of two poems-Love's Victory, a tragi-comedy published in 1658; and Pharonnida, a Heroic Poem, published in 1659. The scene of the first is laid in Sicily, and that of Pharonnida' is also partly in Sicily, but chiefly in Greece. With no court connexion, no light or witty copies of verses to float him into popularity, relying solely on his two long and comparatively unattractive works-to appreciate which, through all the windings of romantic love, plots, escapes, and adventures, more time is required than the author's busy age could afford-we need hardly wonder that Chamberlayne was an unsuccessful poet. His works were almost totally forgotten, till, in our own day, an author no less remarkable for the beauty of his original compositions than for his literary research and sound criticism, Mr Campbell, in his Specimens of the Poets,' in 1819, by quoting largely from Pharonnida,' and pointing out the rich breadth and variety of its scenes,' and the power and pathos of its characters and situations, drew attention to the passion, imagery, purity of sentiment, and tenderness of description, which lay, like metals in the mine,' in the neglected volume of Chamberlayne. We cannot, however, suppose that the works of this poet can ever be popular; his beauties are marred by infelicity of execution: though not deficient in the genius of a poet, he had little of the skill of the artist. The heroic couplet then wandered at will, sometimes into a wilderness of sweets,' but at other times into tediousness, mannerism, and absurdity. The sense was not compressed by the form of the verse, or by any correct rules of metrical harmony. Chamberlayne also laboured under the disadvantage of his story being long and intricate, and his style such-from the prolonged tenderness and pathos of his scenes--as could not be appreciated except on a careful and attentive perusal. Denham was patent to all-short, sententious, and perspicuous. The dissatisfaction of the poet with his obscure and neglected situation, depressed by poverty, breaks out in the following passage descriptive of a rich simpleton:-- How purblind is the world, that such a monster, Souls that make worth their centre, and to that A strong prophetic dream, The heart o' th' microcosm, about which is hurl'd Born high, that robs me of my liberty? 324 |