With this I tread the luscious grape, and drink the blood-red

wine;

And slaves around in order wait, and all are counted mine!

But he that will not rear the lance upon the battle-field,
Nor sway the sword, nor stand behind the breast-defending
shield,

On lowly knee must worship me, with servile kiss ador'd,
And peal the cry of homage high, and hail me mighty lord!

Well indeed might that country expect brave soldiers

limits of our publication, but we make an exception in this case for the author's as well as the poem's sake; and trust that both he, and the writer to whose paper we have appended this note, will excuse the position in which it occurs.-EDs.]

Sanguinis excelsi, majestatisque superbæ

Gloria, res cassi est nominis, umbra fugax.
Nil facit in fatum clypeus. Mors æqua tyrannis
Imponet gelidas imposuitque manus.
Sceptra ruent, regale decus: diademata regum,
Turpiter exitio collabefacta, ruent.

Scilicet exiguo sub pulvere victa putrescent,
Pauper ubi sordet falx, ubi rastra jacent.
Mortifero miles gladio sibi demetat arvum,

Laureolamque super strage tepente serat.
At cedet virtus; nervorum robora cedent:
Qui domat, alternâ sorte domandus erit.
Parca moraturâ veniat, seu præpete pennâ
Irruet, et duro sub pede colla premet.
Ponet anhelantem supremo murmure vitam,
Pallida cum mortis victima serpet iter.
Actum est-et gelidâ marcent in fronte corollæ ;
I, jactata prius robora, lingua, tace.

En ubi purpuream mortis tremebundus ad aram,
Victima perfuso sanguine, victor adest.

Heu capita adveniant aliquando ad busta necesse est;
Membraque frigenti pondere lædat humus.

Vivit et in tumulo justorum gloria: justis

Floret, et ipse suo spirat odore cinis.

when such were her poets! It has been said of old, and echoed by some of the wisest of modern times, "Give me to make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

But to return to Lovelace. Tam Marti quam Veneri, his woes and his wooings can hardly be separated. The same red right hand that hurled the thunders of battle, was also in peace most softly eloquent "in the rhetoric o' the palm." Andrew Marvel in his congratulatory verses describes him as one

Whose hand so rudely grasps the steely brand,

Whose hand so gently melts the lady's hand.

And whatever may be his danger on earth or ocean, the vision of his fair Lucasta hovers over him as a guardian angel. The following verses are addressed to her on his going beyond the seas.

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 blust'ring wind, or swallowing wave.

But I'll not sigh one blast or gale

To swell my sail,

Or pay a tear to 'suage

The foaming blue-god's rage ;

For whether he will let me pass

Or no, I'm still as happy as I was.

Though seas and land betwixt 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.

So then we do anticipate
Our after fate,

And are alive i' the skies,
If thus our lips and eyes
Can speak like spirits unconfin'd

In heaven, their earthy bodies left behind.

Though he cherished, as his picture shows, his own love-locks, the Puritans' abomination; he had of course the properest poetical abhorrence of curl-papers in his mistress, as is proved by his lines "to Amarantha, that she would dishevel her hair."

Amarantha, sweet and fair,

Ah, braid no more that shining hair!
As my curious hand or eye,
Hovering round thee let it fly.
Let it fly as unconfin'd

As its calm ravisher, the wind;
Who hath left his darling th' east,
To wanton o'er that spicy nest.
Ev'ry tress must be confest ;
But neatly tangled at the best ;
Like a clue of golden thread,

Most excellently ravelled.

Do not then wind up that light
In ribands, and o'er-cloud in night,
Like the sun in 's early ray,

But shake your head and scatter day!

I must confess that this gives me a more lively idea than I ever had before of the poetry of the "passis capillis," which so often puzzled my fourth-form imagination, as I travelled through the twelve books of the Æneid.

His scholarship is continually forcing itself into his verses, but I think rather gracefully where he speaks to his mistress of love,

That lightly dances in her eyes
To tunes of Epithalamies.

His illustration of the natural by the artificial may be exemplified in the lines where he describes his mistress

as

is

One whose white satin upper coat of skin

Cut upon velvet rich incarnadine.

In his address "to Lucasta at the bath,"-a situation, by the bye, on which the poets of that day delighted to lavish their most finished verses,-occur the following elegant, and—what is saying a great deal considering the age and the subject-delicate lines.

I' th' Autumn of a Summer's day,
When all the winds got leave to play;
Lucasta, that fair ship, is launch'd,
And from its crust this almond blanch'd.
Court, gentle zephyr, court and fan
Her softer breasts carnation'd wan;
Your charming rhetoric of down
Flies scatter'd from before her frown.

Say, my white Water-lily, say,

How is 't those warm streams break away?
Cut by thy chaste cold breast which dwells

Amid them arm'd in icicles.

I said that this was a favourite subject with the poets of this school. There are few who will not recur to those fanciful verses of Donne, which worthy Isaac the fisherman has embodied in his "Angler," beginning, "Come live with me, and be my love;" when, as his mistress is bathing, the enamoured fish are only too glad to be caught by so fair a bait.

Cowley has followed in the same strain, on the same

occasion.

The fish around her crowded, as they do

To the false light that treacherous fishers show,
And all with as much ease might taken be

As she at first took me.

And Lovelace, in another place, baits in the same

manner.

She sits and entertains her eye

With the moist crystal, and the fry

With burnish'd silver mail'd, whose oars
Amazed still make to the shores;

What need she other bait or charm

But look or angle, but her arm?

Yet as the entire image in a Conceit, it must be owned that the Divine, from whom both Cowley and Lovelace copied, has treated it more daintily and quaintly and trimly in the original. I must be contented, however, to quote only two stanzas:

When thou shalt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,

Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait :
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I!

I have dwelt rather long on this angling without rod or line, but this is a good specimen of the writers in the Conceited style, traces the closeness of their imitations of one another, and shows how threadbare they wore a poor fancy before they had done with it. I know not if one literary theft is considered cancelled by the thief being pillaged in his turn, or whether I am right in charging as a plagiarism what may only have been the coincidence of genius; but in a verse of Lovelace's,

Like to the sentinel stars I watch all night,