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'Tis not the rancour of a cankered heart
That can debase the excellence of art,'

he says in one passage; and how easily one might fancy Keats, transplanted to the age of James I, the author of these most characteristic lines :

In lieu of hounds that make the wooded hills
Talk in a thousand voices to the rills,

I like the pleasing cadence of a line,
Struck by the consort of the sacred Nine.'

Browne's natural tendency is to be copious and glowing in description, and his warm fancy is always tending to run away with him. He wants to be luscious and sweet. So he appeals to the 'blessed Muses':

'Dwell on my lines, and, till the last sand fall,
Run hand in hand with my weak pastoral;
Cause every coupling cadence flow in blisses,
And fill the world with envy of such kisses.
Make all the rarest beauties of our clime,
That deign a sweet look on my younger rhyme,
To linger on each line's enticing graces

As on their lover's lips and chaste embraces.'

But with all this he feels strongly the force of the flowing Puritan tide, and spoils his poetry here and there, as Keats never does, by his resolution to improve the occasion. Browne is a staunch Protestant, and uses plain language about nuns and nunneries, Spain and Rome. All this does his poetry no good. We can imagine him passionate and powerful enough if he had lived a generation earlier. As it is, one has the feeling in reading him that he is living between two worlds of poetry without vital hold on either. His is neither the ardent muse of the young Shakspeare, nor the pure august muse of the great Puritan poet who was to follow him.

The rare qualities of Browne's work cannot blind us to the fact that he is almost destitute of constructive or narrative power. As a narrative poem Britannia's Pastorals is deplorable. The reader is perpetually passing from the woes of one fair one to those of another, and has great difficulty in making it clear to himself at any given time whether he is reading about Marina or Idya or Celia.

The third book ends without any particular conclusion, and there is no reason why Browne should not have gone on in the same strain for half a dozen books more. On the other hand, as pastoral poetry, the work is not without peculiar excellences. It is true that the attempts to keep up the pastoral illusion are sometimes of a desperate character,-as for instance when the poet addresses his readers as 'swaines,'—but Browne's very accurate knowledge of his native county, and his loving enthusiasm for it, give his work a special value, and stamp much of it with the character of a direct personal impression. The allusions to Devonshire are innumerable. Browne had a peculiar love for his native streams, and the waters of his own Tavy are ever murmuring musically through his song. Just as Wordsworth

said that he had made thousands of verses as he strolled by his beloved Rotha, so Browne speaks of

'Tavy's voiceful stream, to whom I owe

More strains than from my pipe can ever flow.'

The little tributary Walla has inspired some of his most charming lines. He abounds in old local words like Berry and

trend, and he calls the Tavy trout

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The shoats with whom is Tavy frought.'

He is enthusiastic about the Devonshire heroes. His knowledge of the country is inbred, and he reveals himself as passing, like Wordsworth, a ' dedicated' youth :

'Nor could I wish those golden hours unspent
Wherein my fancy led me to the woods,

And tuned soft lays of rural merriment,

Of shepherd's love, and never-resting floods,'

We owe to this knowledge and love of the country those pictures of the shepherd wending his early way to his day's work, of the shepherd boy sitting alone on the fell top and piping as he watches his sheep,-—a charming mixture, the whole passage, of literal fact and classical reminiscence ;-of the country maid straying through the fields to make her nosegay, of the boys searching the woods for bird's eggs or hunting the squirrel from tree to tree. It is in such pictures that the reader of Britannia's Pastorals finds his chief pleasure. Browne cannot be said to have victoriously overcome the inherent difficulties of pastoral poetry, but his genuine delight in country sights and sounds makes him

less unreal than any other English poet-if we except perhaps Ramsay,—who has tried this form of composition. He, again like Wordsworth, must be read in selections, if he is to be read with unmixed enjoyment; but in his best passages-and they are not few-he will send to the listener wafts of pure and delightful music as the young figure steps across the moors,

δοχμιᾶν διὰ κλιτύων

ποιμνίτας ὑμεναίους
συρίζων.

W. T. ARNOLD.

BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS.

BOOK I. SONG I.

Marina and the river-god.

The fall of her did make the god below,

Starting, to wonder whence that noise should grow:
Whether some ruder clown in spite did fling

A lamb, untimely fall'n, into his spring:
And if it were, he solemnly then swore

His spring should flow some other way: no more
Should it in wanton manner e'er be seen
To writhe in knots, or give a gown of green
Unto their meadows, nor be seen to play,
Nor drive the rushy-mills, that in his way
The shepherds made; but rather for their lot
Send them red water that their sheep should rot.
And with such moorish springs embrace their field
That it should nought but moss and rushes yield.
Upon each hillock where the merry boy
Sits piping in the shades his notes of joy,
He'd show his anger by some flood at hand
And turn the same into a running sand.

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Thus spake the god: but when as in the water
The corpse came sinking down, he spied the matter,
And catching softly in his arms the maid
He brought her up, and having gently laid
Her on his bank, did presently command
Those waters in her to come forth: at hand
They straight came gushing out, and did contest
Which chiefly should obey their god's behest.
This done, her then pale lips he straight did ope

And from his silver hair let fall a drop

Into her mouth, of such an excellence,

That called back life, which grieved to part from thence Being for troth assur'd that than this one.

She ne'er possess'd à fairer mansion.

Then did the god her body forwards steep,
And cast her for a while into a sleep;
Sitting still by her did his full view take
Of nature's master-piece. Here for her sake
My pipe in silence as of right shall mourn,
Till from the watering we again return.

BOOK I. SONG 2.

The scented grove.

Then walked they to a grove but near at hand,
Where fiery Titan had but small command,
Because the leaves conspiring kept his beams,
For fear of hurting, when he's in extremes,
The under-flowers, which did enrich the ground
With sweeter scents than in Arabia found.

The earth doth yield, which they through pores exhale,
Earth's best of odours, th' aromatical :

Like to that smell which oft our sense descries
Within a field which long unplowed lies,
Somewhat before the setting of the sun;
And where the rainbow in the horizon

Doth pitch her tips: or as when in the prime,
The earth being troubled with a drought long time,
The hand of heaven his spongy clouds doth strain,
And throws into her lap a shower of rain ;
She sendeth up, conceived from the sun,

A sweet perfume and exhalation.

Not all the ointments brought from Delos isle;
Nor from the confines of seven-headed Nile ;
Nor that brought whence Phenicians have abodes,
Nor Cyprus' wild vine-flowers, nor that of Rhodes,
Nor roses' oil from Naples, Capua,

Saffron confected in Cilicia;

Nor that of quinces nor of marjoram

That ever from the isle of Coos came.

Nor these, nor any else, though ne'er so rare,
Could with this place for sweetest smells compare.

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