*

DELIGHT IN GOD ONLY.

*

To heaven's high city I direct my journey,
Whose spangled suburbs entertain mine eye;
Mine eye, by contemplation's great attorney,
Transcends the crystal pavement of the sky.

But what is heaven, great God, compared to thee?
Without thy presence, heaven's no heaven to me.

Without thy presence, earth gives no refection;
Without thy presence, sea affords no treasure;
Without thy presence, air's a rank infection;
Without thy presence, heaven itself no pleasure.
If not possessed, if not enjoyed in thee,
What's earth, or sea, or air, or heaven to me?

173

(1593-1632.)

HERBERT was the brother of the celebrated Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Disappointed in court advancement by the death of James I., he took holy orders; and earned the appellation of "Holy" by his exemplary discharge of his sacred office. His style, like that of so many of his brother poets, is founded on the manner of his friend Donne. The volume of his poems is entitled "The Temple."

H 2

VIRTUE.

SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,

Sweet dews shall weep thy fall to night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,

Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music1 shows you have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But when the whole world turns to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

EDMUND WALLER.

(1605-1687.)

DURING his life of more than fourscore years, Waller wrote about a volume of verse, his latest productions, when verging on the grave, being fully equal to his early strains. Dryden, Pope, Fenton, and others have praised the sweetness of his lines, and they were long popular. His love poems and occasional pieces are airy and graceful, and he had a fine ear for metrical harmony, but much that he wrote is spiritless, feeble and prosaic. Waller was born at Coleshill in Hertfordshire; he succeeded to a good estate, and was long in Parliament a popular but supple politician.

ON A GIRDLE.

THAT which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind:
It was my heaven's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer.
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move!-
A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair.
Give me but what this ribbon bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round!

OLD AGE.

The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er;
So calm are we when passions are no more;

1 Herbert was accustomed to sing his own hymns to music.

DELIGHTS OF THE MUSES.

For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things too certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

175

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become

As they draw near to their eternal home :
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

FROM "A PANEGYRIC TO THE LORD PROTECTOR."

Still as you rise, the State, exalted too,

Finds no distemper while 'tis changed by you---
Changed like the world's great scene! when, without noise,
The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys.

RICHARD CRASHAW.

(1616 ?—1650.)

CRASHAW's father was a preacher at the Temple Church in London. The time of the poet's birth is uncertain. In 1637 he is found in possession of a fellowship in Cambridge, from which he was ejected by the Parliamentary army for non-compliance with the covenant. He went to France, and became a Roman Catholic. By the patronage of the exiled English queen, Henrietta Maria, he obtained an ecclesiastical situation in Italy, and became a canon of the Church of Loretto, where he died.

Crashaw's poetry is of a fervid religious character. He "formed his style on the most quaint and conceited school of Italian poetry, that of Marino" (Campbell), whose "Sospetto d'Herode" he partly translated. It is chiefly in translation that the strength of Crashaw is visible. His pieces are never tedious, but full of the strained and exaggerated conceits of the school of Donne: he had a rich warm fancy, and a delicate ear for music. The Roman Catholic cast of his religious poetry may have contributed to its neglect in this country. An edition of his works edited by W. B. Turnbull, was published in 1858.

FROM "DElights of THE MUSES."

"IN PRAISE OF LESSIUS HIS RULE OF LIFE."

Her garments that upon her sit

As garments should do, close and fit?

A well-clothed soul; that's not oppress'd,
Nor choked with what she should be dress'd?
A soul sheathed in a crystal shrine,

Through which all her bright features shine?
As when a piece of wanton lawn,

A thin aërial veil, is drawn

O'er Beauty's face, seeming to hide,

More sweetly shows the blushing bride :—
A soul whose intellectual beams

No mists do mask, no lazy steams?

A happy soul, that all the way

To heaven rides in a summer's day?—

Would'st see a man, whose well-warm'd blood
Bathes him in a genuine flood?

A man whose tunéd humours be

A set of rarest harmony?

Would'st see blithe looks, fresh cheeks beguile
Age? would'st see December smile?
Would'st see hosts of new roses grow
In a bed of reverend snow?

Warm thoughts, free spirits, flattering
Winter's self into a spring?

In some would'st see a man that can
Live to be old, and still a man?
Whose latest and most leaden hours,

Fall with soft wings stuck with soft flowers;
And when life's sweet fable ends,

Soul and body part like friends;

No quarrels, murmurs, no delay

A kiss, a sigh, and so-away;—

This rare one, reader, would'st thou see?
Hark hither!-and thyself be he.

MARK XII. 17.

All we have is God's, and yet
Cæsar challenges a debt,
Nor hath God a thinner share,1
Whatever Cæsar's payments are.
All is God's, and yet 't is true
All we have is Cæsar's too ;2
All is Cæsar's, and, what odds,

So long as Cæsar's self is God's?

1 See Michaelis, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses (Smith), vol. iii. p. 16.

2 Crashaw was a royalist and speaks the Stuart doctrine. The anecdote of James I. and Bishops Neale and Andrews, respecting the royal prerogative, is well known. — See Hume, chap. xlvii.

THE chronological order of births brings us next to the works of Milton, although his great poems were not given to the world till after the restoration of Charles II. "The nativity of John Milton was cast at an epoch when mighty events were brewing for the political institutions of England, and when poetry had been advanced to greater perfection than it has ever since reached, except by his own voice. Spenser had not been dead ten years, and Shakespeare was yet living."-(Brydges.) Milton was of an Oxfordshire family of yeomen. His grandfather, Richard Milton of Stanton St. Johns, was twice fined in the sum of £60, according to the act of the 23d Elizabeth, for non-attendance on the established church. He is said to have disinherited his son, the poet's father, for becoming a Protestant. The son settled as a scrivener in London, and in this profession, amassed a considerable fortune. The poet, the eldest son, was born in London in 1608. From his childhood he possessed a passion for knowledge, and the ardour of his early studies sowed the seeds of his future blindness. He was sent to St. Paul's School, and at the age of sixteen entered Christ's College, Cambridge. Little is known of his studies at College. The lofty unbending character of his mind involved him in misunderstandings with the heads of his college. Jonson would fain believe that Milton was the last student who suffered the disgrace of corporal punishment. He was probably subjected to rustication. Whatever may have been his feeling towards the heads of the university, for his domestic tutor, Thomas Young, he