more famous than familiar; full of brilliant good sense, yet by no means lacking in tenderness. A woman speaks, and she speaks the thought of many a woman's heart, yet it is hardly to be supposed that a woman wrote it: —

"Love me little, love me long,

Is the burden of my song;
Love that is too hot and strong
Burneth soon to waste.

Still I would not have thee cold,
Not too backward or too bold;
Love that lasteth till 't is old
Fadeth not in haste.
Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song!

"Proceeded on with no less art,

My tongue was engineer,

I thought to undermine the heart By whispering in the ear.

"When this did nothing, I brought down
Great cannon oaths, and shot
A thousand, thousand to the town,
And still it yielded not!

"I then resolved to starve the place By cutting off all kisses; Praising and gazing on her face, And all such little blisses!

"To draw her out and from her strength I drew all batteries in,

And brought myself to lie, at length, As if no siege had been.

"When I had done what I could do, And thought the place my own,

The enemy lay quiet too,

And smiled at all was done.

"I sent to know from whence and where These hopes and this relief;

A spy informed Honor was there,
And did command in chief.

"March, march! quoth I, the word straight give Let's lose no time but leave her! That giant upon air will live,

And hold it out forever!"

This is manifestly improper, and Sir John Suckling is never to be trusted for good behavior through many stanzas but how enchantingly gay he is! The utter frankness of his hilarity does something toward atoning for its coarseness. We are quite sure that he is never worse than his words, and even suspect that he is not altogether so desperate a rake as he sometimes pretends. If his court esy seem scant, there is, at all events, no craft lurking beneath it; and so far from hating or discrediting the object of his bold advances because she had repelled them, he treats her with a mixture of petulant astonishment and whimsical respect altogether naif and amusing. Even here, where taste and delicacy are so near being mortally offended, we divine, both in woer and wooed, that which constitutes the peculiar and inalienable virtue of their epoch, — indomitable spirit, the abandon of perfect health, the absolute negation and impossibility of the lackadaisical.

From this, its extreme of reckless levity, we may follow the song of the latest chivalric age in its modulation through

Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet.

Within mine eyes he makes his nest,
His bed amid my tender breast;
My kisses are his daily feast,
And yet he robs me of my rest;
Ah, wanton, will you?

"And if I sleep, then peereth he

With pretty slight,

And makes his pillow of my knee
The livelong night;

Strike I the lute, he tunes the string,
He music plays if I but sing;
He lends me every lovely thing,
Yet cruel he my heart doth sting;
Ah, wanton, will you?

"Else I, with roses, every day

Will whip you hence,

And bind you when you long to play

For your offense;

I'll shut my eyes to keep you in,

I'll make you fast it, for your sin;
I'll count your power not worth a pin;
Alas, what hereby shall I win,
So he gainsay me?

"What if I beat the wanton boy
With many a rod?

He will gainsay me with annoy,
Because a god.

Then sit thou softly on my knee,
And let thy bower my bosom be;
Lurk in my eyes, I like of thee!
O Cupid, so thou pity me,

Spare not, but play thee!"
(Thomas Lodge.)

"Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing,

As sweet unto a shepherd as a king,

There is a touch of earnestness in these last lines of Herrick's which allies them, it may be, a little more closely with the joyous tenderness of Lovelace than with the mere wanton fancies to which they are joined above. It is hard not to embrace any pretext for transcribing in full "Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind," and "When love with unconfinéd wings," and space shall at all events be made for these other lines to Lucasta, less frequently quoted than the first, but, rather in form than in spirit, less beautiful:

"If to be absent were to be

Away from thee,

Or that when I am gone
You or I were alone,

Then, my Lucasta, might I crave

Pity from blustering wind, or swallowing wave.

"Though seas and lands between us both, Our faith and troth,

Like separated souls,

All time and space controls; Above the highest sphere we meet,

Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet."

Lucy Sacheverell married another, on a false report that Richard Lovelace had fallen in foreign war, and he was twice for years in prison, and died miserably at forty; but somehow we cannot think

that the bright essence of the most ideal of English knights, after Sir Philip Sidney, was permanently subdued by adverse fate. Who shall say that the mystical reunion foreshadowed in that last stanza may not actually have taken place far outside of these mundane conditions, which the poet invariably treated with a kind of angelic scorn?

One of the most appreciative critics of Lovelace speaks of the "plaintive sweetness" of the lines To Althea from Prison. To us this adjective seems to be wholly misapplied. Plaintive, in the strict sense of the word, the gallant singers of this period never are, and when they are pensive we almost always feel that it is their humor so to be; that they are sad for an hour only, by way of curious luxury and restful relaxation from their wonted high-strung mood, as in the well-known lines of Beaumont: "Hence, all ye vain delights,

As short as are the nights

Wherein you spend your folly!
There's nought in this life sweet,
If man were wise to see 't,
But only melancholy."

In this dulcet and exquisite minor, Waller has left us one masterpiece:

"Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time on me
That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

"Tell her that's young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That, hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

"Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

"Then die, that she

The common fate of all things rare,
May read in thee,

How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!"

Sighs light as these come usually from a surfeit of content. Before actual pain, even of the sort that cuts deepest, -repulse, injury, or unfaith from the

1 Observe the echoes out of these and the previous lines in the interludes between the cantoes of the Princess.

one best loved, the poets of that time are wont to stand erect and unflinching. Hear Waller again:

"It is not that I love you less 1
Than when before your feet I lay,

But to prevent the sad increase
Of hopeless love I keep away.

In vain, alas! for everything
Which I have known belongs to you;
Your form does to my fancy cling,
And make my old wounds bleed anew.
But vowed I have, and never must
Your banished servant trouble you;

For if I break you may mistrust
The vow I made to love you, too."

The somewhat stern lines which fol

low are from a nameless writer, in a manuscript of Elizabethan verse:

"Change thy mind sith she doth change:
Let not fancy still abuse thee;
Thy untruth cannot seem strange,

Since her falsehood doth excuse thee.
Love is dead, but thou art free;
She doth live, but dead to thee.

"Love no more sith she is gone;

She is gone, and loves another;
Being thus deceived by one,

Crave her love, but love no other.
She was false, bid love adieu;
She was best, but yet untrue."

Finest of all, perhaps, is that celebrated sonnet of Michael Drayton's, where the fiery and magnanimous nat-. ure of both lovers is so plainly to be read in the dramatic memorial of their strife:

"Since there's no hope, come, let us kiss and part!
Nay, I have done. You get no more of me;
And I am glad - yea, glad with all my heart-
That thus so clearly I myself can free.
Shake hands forever! Cancel all our vows!
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen, on either of our brows,

That we one jot of former love retain !
Now, at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him
over,

From death to life thou mightst him yet recover."

Men who hold their lives light, and rule their loves proudly, are less liable than others to be deeply dismayed or sorrowful above measure in the prospect of death. They will scorn to be surprised by the last enemy, or even hastily to conclude that power to be inimical whose onward march their wariest valor cannot possibly avert. It is emphatic

ally the case with the virile singers of the last great lyrical age, the immediate descendants of Surrey and Chaucer. When their lives are fullest of hope and adventure, death is in all their thoughts. They seem resolved upon this intimacy. They will regard the inevitable not with equanimity merely, but with cordiality. They will not even await its advent, but go forth to meet it with the challenge and welcome of a friend, as Crashaw says. In their brightest hours, amidst their most ardent strains, the memento mori note may be heard incessantly, like the regular striking of a silver bell. How often it occurs in Shakespeare's sonnets, as at the close of the incomparable seventy-third, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold," etc.

"In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

In a different phase of the same mood, and in smoother, sweeter measures than are usual with him, sings Donne:"Sweetest love, I do not go

For weariness of thee;

Nor in the hope the world can show A fitter love for me

But since that I

Must die at last, 't is best To use myself in jest

Thus by feignéd death to die.

"Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfill.
But think that we

Are but turned aside to sleep
They who one another keep
Alive ne'er parted be."

And Henry Lawes:

"Grieve not, dear love, although we often part, But know that nature gently doth us sever, Thereby to train us up with tender art

To brook the day when we must part forever."

And Sir Philip Sidney:—

"Oft have I mused, but now at length I find

Why those that die men say they do depart. Depart, a word so gentle to my mind,

Weakly did seem to paint Death's ugly dart. But now the stars with their strange course do bind

Me one to leave with whom I leave my heart;

I hear a cry of spirits, faint and blind,

That parting thus my chiefest part I part."

Very seldom, as in the verse of Lawes above, is separation spoken of, even casually, as eternal. Those were days of unaffected faith and open vision, and none who thought at all thought of our conscious life as ending here below. Nevertheless this friendliness with death, which we find so impressive, seems due quite as much to sanity as to sanctity of spirit; to perfect accord with the past rather than to definite anticipations for the future. We shall find that the dirges, elegies, and epitaphs of the time strengthen and console rather than sadden us.

The note of triumph is audible in almost all the elegies and epitaphs on Sir Philip Sidney:

66 England, the Netherlands, the heavens, the arts,
The soldier, and the world have ta'en six parts
Of the noble Sidney, for none may suppose
That a small heap of dust can Sidney inclose!
His body hath England, for she it bred;
Netherlands his blood, in her defense shed;
The heavens his soul, the arts his fame,
All soldiers' tears, and the world his name!"

Even the Countess of Pembroke, in her Lament of Clorinda, can dwell only on the glory of her brother's departure and the brightness of his reward. “Ah, me," she cries, "can so divine a thing be dead?" And then,

"Ah, no, it is not dead, and cannot be,

But lives for aye in blissful Paradise, Where, like a new-born babe, it soft doth lie In bed of lilies wrapped in tender wise, And compassed all about with roses sweet, And dainty violets, from head to feet."

It would be very interesting to compare, with reference rather to their spirit than their structure, Spenser's Astrophel, Matthew Royden's Elegy, and any others still in being of the two hundred said to have been written on Sidney's death, with the Adonais of Shelley, the Thyrsis of Matthew Arnold, and the in