ply

7

The sampler, and to tease the hus wife wool.

What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for tha Love-darting eyes, or tresses like th Morn?

There was another meaning in these gifts Think what, and be advised; you are bu young yet.

Lady. I had not thought to have un locked my lips

In this unhallowed air, but that this Jug gler

Would think to charm my judgment, a mine eyes,

Obtruding false rules pranked in reason garb.

I hate when Vice can bolt her arguments And Virtue has no tongue to check he pride.

Impostor! do not charge most innoce Nature,

7

As if she would her children should be rio

800

Comus. She fables not. I feel that I do fear Her words set off by some superior power; And, though not mortal, yet a cold shuddering dew

Dips me all o'er, as when the wrath of Jove Speaks thunder and the chains of Erebus To some of Saturn's crew. I must dissemble,

And try her yet more strongly. - Come, no more!

This is mere moral babble, and direct
Against the canon laws of our foundation.
I must not suffer this; yet 't is but the
lees

And settlings of a melancholy blood.

810

But this will cure all straight; one sip of this

up their pearlèd wrists, and took her in,

Bearing her straight to aged Nereus' hall; Who, piteous of her woes, reared her lank head,

And gave her to his daughters to imbathe In nectared lavers strewed with asphodil, And through the porch and inlet of each

Listen, and appear to us,

In name of great Oceanus,

By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace,
And Tethys' grave majestic pace;
By hoary Nereus' wrinkled look,
And the Carpathian wizard's hook;
By scaly Triton's winding shell,
And old soothsaying Glaucus' spell;
By Leucothea's lovely hands,
And her son that rules the strands;
By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet,
And the songs of Sirens sweet;
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,
And fair Ligea's golden comb,
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks;
By all the nymphs that nightly dance
Upon thy streams with wily glance;
Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head
From thy coral-paven bed,

870

880

And bridle in thy headlong wave,
Till thou our summons answered have.
Listen and sav

SABRINA rises, attended by Water-nymphs, a sings.

By the rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the os dank,

My sliding chariot stays,

Thick set with agate, and the azurn shee
Of turkis blue, and emerald green,

That in the channel strays:
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O'er the cowslip's velvet head,
That bends not as I tread.
Gentle swain, at thy request
I am here!

Spir. Goddess dear,

We implore thy powerful hand
To undo the charmed band
Of true virgin here distressed

Through the force and through the wile
Of unblessed enchanter vile.

Sabr. Shepherd, 't is my office best To help insnared Chastity. Brightest Lady, look on me. Thus I sprinkle on thy breast Drops that from my fountain pure I have kept of pretious cure; Thrice upon thy finger's tip, Thrice upon thy rubied lip: Next this marble venomed seat, Smeared with gums of glutinous heat,

I touch with chaste palms moist and col

Now the spell hath lost his hold;

And I must haste ere morning hour

To wait in Amphitrite's bower.

SABRINA descends, and the LADY rises out

May thy lofty head be crowned
With many a tower and terrace round,
And here and there thy banks upon
With groves of myrrh and cinnamon.
Come, Lady; while Heaven lends us
grace,

Let us fly this cursed place,
Lest the Sorcerer us entice
With some other new device.
Not a waste or needless sound
Till we come to holier ground.
I shall be your faithful guide
Through this gloomy covert wide;
And not many furlongs thence
Is your Father's residence,
Where this night are met in state
Many a friend to gratulate
His wished presence, and beside
All the Swains that there abide
With jigs and rural dance resort.
We shall catch them at their sport,
And our sudden coming there

940

950

To triumph in victorious dance
O'er sensual Folly and Intemperance.

The dances ended, the SPIRIT epiloguizes.
Spir. To the ocean now I fly,
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 crispèd shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocond 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

980

990

1000

Waters the odorous banks, that blow
Flowers of more mingled hue
Than her purfled 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;
But far above in spangled sheen
Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced,
Holds his dear Psyche sweet intranced,
After her wandring 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,

1010

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 spheary chime:
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

1020

I

Lycidas is an elegy, and as such offers no peculiar difficulties of interpretation for a modern reader; but it is also a pastoral elegy, and belongs therefore to a type of literature which has fallen so completely into disuse that an act of the historic imagination is required to place us in the proper attitude toward it. Unless we understand something of the theory underlying the pastoral poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and something of the mental conditions lying behind that theory, we can with difficulty do justice to a poem like Lycidas, which moves in a world of deliberate artifice, where the restrictions and the liberties are alike fantastic. Dr. Johnson's amusingly jejune animadversions upon Lycidas represent in its extremest form the danger of judging such a poem by standards of mere "common-sense." The letter of such criticism as his is often true, but the spirit is grotesquely false, because it leaves out of account both the general differences which mark off poetry from prose, and, still more flagrantly, the particular mould into which the pastoral poets deliberately chose to cast their thoughts.

The rise and progress of pastoral poetry on the Continent and in England forms one of the most curious chapters in the history of literature. From Portugal, where it took its rise in the fourteenth century, it spread rapidly through the whole of civilized Europe, and persisted in various forms until late in the eighteenth century. It enlisted the pens of the greatest writers, -Cervantes in Spain, Tasso and Boccaccio in Italy, Spenser, Fletcher, and Milton in England. It invaded the drama; it found

its way into politics, and into religion. In France it produced at least one great

painter, Watteau, and built up a system of manners and sentiments which not even the subtle laughter of Molière could overthrow The mock village where Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at being shepherdesses and milkmaids still stands in the park of the Petit Trianon at Ver sailles; and the royal toy, with its pathetic associations, reminds us how persistent was the enthusiasm for the pastoral idea, and in what curious ramifications the enthusi asm worked itself out. No movement of mind ever takes place on such a scale as this unless it springs from deep causes; the art products which accompany it, however artificial and perverse they may seem on the surface, minister to real spiritual needs of the age wherein they appear.

The source of the pastoral poetry and romance of the Renaissance is to be found naturally, in the country idylls of the Sici lian poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus and in the Bucolics of Virgil. Even the earliest and simplest of the Sicilian idylls have a note of artificiality, in that they are studies of country life from the outside, by minds more or less artistically sophisti cated. Virgil, essentially an urban poet though with a keen sensibility to the idyllic aspects of country life, took still more plainly this outside point of view, a view exactly opposite (to choose a modern instance) from that which Wordsworth constantly tried to

assume.

This primary bent away from realism received, when the pastoral form of poetry began to be received in southern Europe, a great reinforcement from the nature of the Renaissance itself. The lif of the Renaissance was an urban life; be yond the circumvallations of defense within which the great revival ran its course stil lay the shadow of medievalism. Any rea sympathy with the life of the woods and fields on the part of a man of the town wa