Over her hung a canopy of state,
Not of rich tissue nor of spangled gold,
But of a substance, though not animate,
Yet of a heavenly and spiritual mould,
That only eyes of spirits might behold:
Such light as from main rocks of diamond,
Shooting their sparks at Phoebus, would rebound,
And little angels, holding hands, danced all around.

[The Sorceress of Vain Delight.]
[From the same.]

Upon a hilly bank her head she cast,
On which the bower of Vain Delight was built.
White and red roses for her face were plac'd,
And for her tresses marigolds were spilt:
Them broadly she display'd, like flaming gilt,
Till in the ocean the glad day was drown'd:
Then up again her yellow locks she wound,
And with green fillets in their pretty cauls them bound.

What should I here depaint her lily hand,
Her veins of violets, her ermine breast,
Which there in orient colours living stand:
Or how her gown with silken leaves is drest,
Or how her watchman, arm'd with boughy crest,
A wall of prim hid in his bushes bears
Shaking at every wind their leafy spears,
While she supinely sleeps, nor to be waked fears.

The garden like a lady fair was cut,

That lay as if she slumber'd in delight,
And to the open skies her eyes did shut:
The azure fields of Heaven were 'sembled right
In a large round, set with the flowers of light:
The flowers-de-luce, and the round sparks of dew
That hung upon their azure leaves, did shew
Like twinkling stars, that sparkle in the evening blue. With easy breath till it be raised higher;

Such watery orbicles young boys do blow
Out from their soapy shells, and much admire
The swimming world, which tenderly they row

But if they chance but roughly once aspire,
The painted bubble instantly doth fall.
Here when she came she 'gan for music call,
And sung this wooing song to welcome him withal:

Over the hedge depends the graping elm,
Whose greener head, empurpuled in wine,
Seemed to wonder at his bloody helm,
And half suspect the bunches of the vine,
Lest they, perhaps, his wit should undermine;
For well he knew such fruit he never bore:
But her weak arms embraced him the more,
And she with ruby grapes laugh'd at her paramour.

*

The roof thick clouds did paint, from which three boys,
Three gaping mermaids with their ew'rs did feed,
Whose breasts let fall the stream, with sleepy noise,
To lions' mouths, from whence it leap'd with speed;
And in the rosy laver seem'd to bleed;
The naked boys unto the water's fall
Their stony nightingales had taught to call,
When Zephyr breath'd into their watery interall.

And all about, embayed in soft sleep,

A herd of charmed beasts aground were spread,
Which the fair witch in golden chains did keep,
And them in willing bondage fettered:
Once men they liv'd, but now the men were dead,
And turn'd to beasts; so fabled Homer old,
That Circe with her potion, charm'd in gold,
Used manly souls in beastly bodies to immould.

Through this false Eden, to his leman's bower,
(Whom thousand souls devoutly idolise)
Our first destroyer led our Saviour;
There, in the lower room, in solemn wise,
They danc'd a round and pour'd their sacrifice
To plump Lyæus, and among the rest,
The jolly priest, in ivy garlands drest,
Chanted wild orgials, in honour of the feast.

High over all, Panglorie's blazing throne,
In her bright turret, all of crystal wrought,
Like Phoebus' lamp, in midst of heaven, shone:
Whose starry top, with pride infernal fraught,
Self-arching columns to uphold were taught,
In which her image still reflected was
By the smooth crystal, that, most like her glass
In beauty and in frailty did all others pass.

A silver wand the sorceress did sway,
And, for a crown of gold, her hair she wore;
Only a garland of rose-buds did play
About her locks, and in her hand she bore
A hollow globe of glass, that long before
She full of emptiness had bladdered,
And all the world therein depictured:
Whose colours, like the rainbow, ever vanished.

'Love is the blossom where there blows
Everything that lives or grows:

Love doth make the heavens to move,
And the sun doth burn in love;
Like the strong and weak doth yoke,
And makes the ivy climb the oak;
Under whose shadows lions wild
Soften'd by love grow tame and mild:
Love no medicine can appease,
He burns the fishes in the seas;

Not all the skill his wounds can stench,1
Not all the sea his fire can quench;
Love did make the bloody spear
Once a leafy coat to wear,

While in his leaves there shrouded lay
Sweet birds, for love, that sing and play:
And of all love's joyful flame

I the bud and blossom am.
Only bend thy knee to me,
Thy wooing shall thy winning be.

'See, see, the flowers that below
Now as fresh as morning blow,
And of all the virgin rose,
That as bright Aurora shows:
How they all unleaved lie
Losing their virginity;
Like unto a summer shade,
But now born and now they fade.
Everything doth pass away,
There is danger in delay;
Come, come, gather then the rose,
Gather it, or it you lose.
All the sands of Tagus' shore
Into my bosom casts his ore:
All the valleys' swimming corn
To my house is yearly borne;
Every grape of every vine
Is gladly bruis'd to make me wine;
While ten thousand kings as proud
To carry up my train have bow'd,
And a world of ladies send me
In my chambers to attend me;
All the stars in heaven that shine,
And ten thousand more are mine:
Only bend thy knee to me,
Thy wooing shall thy winning be.'

1 Staunch.

Thus sought the dire enchantress in his mind
Her guileful bait to have embosomed :
But he her charms dispersed into wind,
And her of insolence admonished,
And all her optic glasses shattered.

thrown into prison. He published various treatises,
satires, and poems, during this period, though he was
treated with great rigour. He was released, under
bond for good behaviour, in 1663, and survived
nearly four years afterwards, dying in London on
the 2d of May 1667.

So with her sire to hell she took her flight (The starting air flew from the damned sprite), Where deeply both aggriev'd plunged themselves in early productions, written before he had imbibed the

Wither's fame as a poet is derived chiefly from his

night.

But to their Lord, now musing in his thought,
A heavenly volley of light angels flew,
And from his father him a banquet brought
Through the fine element, for well they knew,
After his Lenten fast, he hungry grew:
And as he fed, the holy choirs combine
To sing a hymn of the celestial Trine;

sectarian gloom of the Puritans, or become em-
broiled in the struggles of the civil war. A col-
lection of his poems was published by himself in
1622, with the title, Mistress of Philarete; his Shep-
herds' Hunting, being certain Eclogues written
during the time of the author's imprisonment in the
Marshalsea, appeared in 1633. His Collection of
Emblems, ancient and modern, Quickened with Me-

All thought to pass, and each was past all thought trical Illustrations, made their appearance in 1635.

divine.

His satirical and controversial works were numerous, but are now forgotten. Some authors of our own day (Mr Southey in particular) have helped to popularise Wither, by frequent quotation and eulogy; but Mr Ellis, in his Specimens of Early English Poets, was the first to point out that playful fancy, pure taste, and artless delicacy of sentiment, which distinguish the poetry of his early youth.' His poem on Christmas affords a lively picture of the manners of the times. His Address to Poetry, the sole yet cheering companion of his prison solitude, is worthy of the theme, and superior to most of the effusions of that period. The pleasure with which he recounts the various charms and the divine skill' of his Muse, that had derived nourishment and delight from the 'meanest objects' of external nature-a daisy, a bush, or a tree; and which, when these picturesque and beloved scenes of the country were denied him, could gladden even the vaults and shades of a prison, is one of the richest offerings that has yet been made to the pure and hallowed shrine of poesy. The superiority of intellectual pursuits over the gratifications of sense, and all the malice of fortune, has never been more touchingly or finely illustrated.

The birds' sweet notes, to sonnet out their joys,
Attemper'd to the lays angelical;
And to the birds the winds attune their noise;
And to the winds the waters hoarsely call,
And echo back again revoiced all ;
That the whole valley rung with victory.
But now our Lord to rest doth homewards fly:
See how the night comes stealing from the mountains

high.

GEORGE WITHER.

·

GEORGE WITHER (1588-1667) was a voluminous author, in the midst of disasters and sufferings that would have damped the spirit of any but the most adventurous and untiring enthusiast. Some of his happiest strains were composed in prison: his limbs were incarcerated within stone walls and iron bars, but his fancy was among the hills and plains, with shepherds hunting, or loitering with Poesy, by rustling boughs and murmuring springs. There is a freshness and natural vivacity in the poetry of Wither, that render his early works a 'perpetual feast.' We cannot say that it is a feast where no crude surfeit reigns,' for he is often harsh, obscure, and affected; but he has an endless diversity of style and subjects, and true poetical feeling and expression. Wither was a native of Hampshire, and received his education at Magdalen College, Oxford. He first appeared as an author in the year 1613, when he published a satire, entitled Abuses Stript and Whipt. For this he was thrown into the Marshalsea, where he composed his fine poem, The Shepherds' Hunting. When the abuses satirised by the poet had accumulated and brought on the civil war, Wither took the popular side, and sold his paternal estate to raise a troop of horse for the parliament. He rose to the rank of a major, and in 1642 was made governor of Farnham Castle, afterwards held by Denham. Wither was accused of deserting his appointment, and the castle was ceded the same year to Sir William Waller. During the struggles of that period, the poet was made prisoner by the royalists, and stood in danger of capital punishment, when Denham interfered for his brother bard, alleging, that as long as Wither lived, he (Denham) would not be considered the worst poet in England. The joke was a good one, if it saved Wither's life; but George was not frightened from the perilous contentions of the times. He was afterwards one of Cromwell's majors general, and kept watch and ward over the royalists of Surrey. From the sequestrated estates of these gentlemen, Wither obtained a considerable fortune; but the Restoration came, and he was stript of all his possessions. He remonstrated loudly and angrily; his remonstrances were voted libels, and the unlucky poet was again

[The Companionship of the Muse.]

[From the Shepherds' Hunting.]
See'st thou not, in clearest days,
Oft thick fogs cloud heaven's rays;
And the vapours that do breathe
From the earth's gross womb beneath,
Seem they not with their black steams
To pollute the sun's bright beams,
And yet vanish into air,
Leaving it, unblemish'd, fair?
So, my Willy, shall it be
With Detraction's breath and thee:
It shall never rise so high,
As to stain thy poesy.

As that sun doth oft exhale
Vapours from each rotten vale;
Poesy so sometime drains
Gross conceits from muddy brains;
Mists of envy, fogs of spite,

'Twixt men's judgments and her light:
But so much her power may do,
That she can dissolve them too.
If thy verse do bravely tower,
As she makes wing she gets power;
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more:
Till she to the high'st hath past,
Then she rests with fame at last:
Let nought therefore thee affright,
But make forward in thy flight;

WILLIAM BROWNE.

WILLIAM BROWNE (1590-1645) was a pastoral and descriptive poet, who, like Phineas and Giles Fletcher, adopted Spenser for his model. He was a native of Tavistock, in Devonshire, and the beautiful scenery of his native county seems to have inspired his early strains. His descriptions are vivid and true to nature. Browne was tutor to the Earl of Carnarvon, and on the death of the latter at the battle of Newbury in 1643, he received the patronage and lived in the family of the Earl of Pembroke. In this situation he realised a competency, and, according to Wood, purchased an estate. He died at Ottery-St-Mary (the birth-place of Coleridge) in 1645. Browne's works consist of Britannia's Pastorals, the first part of which was published in 1613, the second part in 1616. He wrote, also, a pastoral poem of inferior merit, entitled, The Shepherd's Pipe. In 1620, a masque by Browne was produced at court, called The Inner Temple Masque; but it was not printed till a hundred and twenty years after the author's death, transcribed from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library. As all the poems of Browne were produced before he was thirty years of age, and the best when he was little more than twenty, we need not be surprised at their containing marks of juvenility, and frequent traces of resemblance to previous poets, especially Spenser, whom he warmly admired. His pastorals obtained the approbation of Selden, Drayton, Wither, and Ben Jonson. Britannia's Pastorals are written in the heroic couplet, and contain much beautiful descriptive poetry. Browne had great facility of expression, and an intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of inanimate nature, and the characteristic features of the English landscape. Why he has failed in maintaining his ground among his contemporaries, must be attributed to the want of vigour and condensation in his works, and the almost total absence of human interest. His shepherds and shepherdesses have nearly as little character as the silly sheep' they tend; whilst pure description, that takes the place of sense,' can never permanently interest any large number of readers. So completely had some of the poems of Browne vanished from the public view and recollection, that, had it not been for a single copy of them possessed by the Rev. Thomas Warton, and which that poetical student and quary lent to be transcribed, it is supposed there would have remained little of those works which their author fondly hoped would

·

|

Keep his name enroll'd past his that shines
In gilded marble, or in brazen leaves.

Warton cites the following lines of Browne, as containing an assemblage of the same images as the morning picture in the L'Allegro of Milton :-—

name of Philarete in a pastoral poem; and Milton is supposed to have copied his plan in Lycidas. There is also a faint similarity in some of the sentiments and images. Browne has a very fine illustration of a

rose:

[A Descriptive Sketch.]

But

O what a rapture have I gotten now!
That age of gold, this of the lovely brow,
Have drawn me from my song! I onward run
(Clean from the end to which I first begun),
In whom the virtues and the graces rest,
ye, the heavenly creatures of the West,
Pardon! that I have run astray so long,
And grow so tedious in so rude a song.
If you yourselves should come to add one grace
Unto a pleasant grove or such like place,
Where, here, the curious cutting of a hedge,
There in a pond, the trimming of the sedge;
Here the fine setting of well-shaded trees,
The walks there mounting up by small degrees,
The gravel and the green so equal lie,
It, with the rest, draws on your ling'ring eye:
Here the sweet smells that do perfume the air,
Arising from the infinite repair
Of odoriferous buds, and herbs of price,
(As if it were another paradise),

So please the smelling sense, that you are fain
Where last you walk'd to turn and walk again.
There the small birds with their harmonious notes
Sing to a spring that smileth as she floats:
For in her face a many dimples show,
And often skips as it did dancing go:
Here further down an over-arched alley
That from a hill goes winding in a valley,
You spy at end thereof a standing lake,
Where some ingenious artist strives to make
The water (brought in turning pipes of lead
anti-Through birds of earth most lively fashioned)
To counterfeit and mock the sylvans all
In singing well their own set madrigal.
This with no small delight retains your ear,
And makes you think none blest but who live there.
Then in another place the fruits that be
In gallant clusters decking each good tree,
Invite your hand to crop them from the stem,
And liking one, taste every sort of them:
Then to the arbours walk, then to the bowers,
Thence to the walks again, thence to the flowers,
Then to the birds, and to the clear spring thence,
Now pleasing one, and then another sense:
Here one walks oft, and yet anew begin'th,
As if it were some hidden labyrinth.

By this had chanticleer, the village cock,
Bidden the goodwife for her maids to knock ;
And the swart ploughman for his breakfast stayed,
That he might till those lands were fallow laid;
The hills and valleys here and there resound
With the re-echoes of the deep-mouth'd hound;
Each shepherd's daughter with her cleanly pail
Was come a-field to milk the morning's meal;
And ere the sun had climb'd the eastern hills,
To gild the muttering bourns and pretty rills,
Before the labouring bee had left the hive,
And nimble fishes, which in rivers dive,
Began to leap and catch the drowned fly,
I rose from rest, not infelicity.

Look, as a sweet rose fairly budding forth

Betrays her beauties to th' enamour'd morn,
Until some keen blast from the envious north
Kills the sweet bud that was but newly born;
Or else her rarest smells, delighting,
Make herself betray

Some white and curious hand, inviting
To pluck her thence away.

[Evening.]

As in an evening, when the gentle air
Breathes to the sullen night a soft repair,

I oft have sat on Thames' sweet bank, to hear
My friend with his sweet touch to charm mine ear:
When he hath play'd (as well he can) some strain,
That likes me, straight ask the same again,
And he, as gladly granting, strikes it o'er

Browne celebrated the death of a friend under the With some sweet relish was forgot before: