And take his bag, but thus much know, He should from her full lips derive Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise as appears to me his due, on another occasion; but the public are deaf, except to proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore give an example of the sweetness and power of his verse. "To his Coy Mistress. Had we but world enough, and time, We would sit down and think which way And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near: Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, Now, therefore, while the youthful hue And while thy willing soul transpires Than languish in his slow-chapp'd pow'r.. Thus, though we cannot make our sun In Browne's 'Pastorals,' notwithstanding the weakness and prolixity of his general plan, there are repeated examples of single lines and passages of extreme beauty and delicacy, both of sentiment and description, such as the following Picture of Night: "Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd's song, And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongue And all the upper world lay in a trance, Only the curled streams soft chidings kept; And little gales that from the green leaf swept Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over tne green lap of nature through almost every page of our author's writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable others, might be quoted. 6 His Philarete' (the fourth song of the 'Shepherd's Pipe') has been said to be the origin of Lycidas;' but there is no resemblance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a friend. The Inner Temple Mask' has also been made the foundation of 'Comus,' with as little reason. But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after; and every writer that finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made to set up his claim to originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged against the principal character in 'Paradise Lost' (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw's translation of Marino's 'Sospetto d'Herode.' The description of Satan alluded to is given in the following stanzas: "Below the bottom of the great abyss, There where one centre reconciles all things, The judge of torments, and the king of tears, His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night, His flaming eyes' dire exhalation In this sad house of slow destruction (His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash, While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash." This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton's description: "His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin'd and the excess Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainty, Milton's mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton's boldest imagery, though its effect be injured by the incongruous mixture above stated. "Struck with these great concurrences of things,* He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings, While thus heav'n's counsels, by the low The poet adds "The while his twisted tail he gnaw'd for spite." There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, * Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah. "He spreads his sail-broad vans."- Par. Lost,' b. ii., l. 927. takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time: "Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given ? Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine eyes Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shows ?" &c. This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue; but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot re-ascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot without a violent effort picture to itself. In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton's description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates : "Thrice howl'd the caves of night, and thrice the sound, Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes, Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound: 'Mongst all the palaces in hell's command, The adamantine doors for ever stand Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears. * See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book x. of 'Paradise Lost.' |