"SONG. Go, lovely rose ! Tell her that wastes her time, and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet, and fair, she seems to be. Tell her that's young, And shuns to have her graces spy'd', In deserts, where no men abide, Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retir'd: Suffer herself to be desir'd, And not blush so to be admir'd. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare How small a part of time they share, That are so wondrous sweet, and fair!" 1 The syllables "graces spy'd" drag painfully on the tongue, and I remember to have heard the greatest living authority on melodious numbers suggest that Waller must have written "graces eyed." The first edition of 1645, however, has, by an obvious misprint, "grace spy'd," and I believe that what Waller wrote was grace espy'd." 66 Less known, but almost as perfect, is "On a Girdle." "ON A GIRDLE. That which her slender waist confin'd, A narrow compass! and yet there Take all the rest the sun goes round"." The power of writing songs like these survived the introduction of classical taste in England, as it had done in France. Gradually it declined, until for a short time during the preeminence of Pope, it may almost be said to have disappeared; but throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century the gift of song-writing was present among 1 "Is," in the edition of 1645, where the present tense is kept up through the poem. 2 In 1645: "Give me but what this riband tied, Take all the sun goes round beside." the English poets. It is in the non-lyrical departments of poetic art, especially in didactic, descriptive, and dramatic verse, that we have to look for the change that now was imminent. The next example of Waller's work which comes before us, the heroic poem called The Battle of the Summer Islands, throws more light upon the development of this change than the love-songs to Sacharissa. It is therefore more interesting to us, although a comparatively insignificant work in itself. It is the most considerable poem, in length, which Waller ever published, and deals, in three cantos, with a sort of pseudo-Homeric subject, a battle between the islanders of Bermuda and two spermaceti whales that had got stranded in a shallow bay. It used to be taken for granted that Waller visited Bermuda about this time, or in 1640; it is almost certain that he was one of the Adventurers, or landlords, into whose plantations the archipelago was divided. But Major-General Lefroy, who has lately chronicled the early history of the islands in two copious volumes, has found no trace of the poet's visit, and disbelieves in it. He points out that Waller makes blunders in his description, such as no real observer could make; he takes the low cedars which covered the islands to be cedars of Lebanon, and talks of "the lofty cedar which to Heaven aspires:" while he promises to lull the savages with Sacharissa's name although there was not a single savage there to lull. It seems, however, to have escaped Major-General Lefroy that the report that Waller visited Bermuda cannot have been set afloat by the fact that he wrote the Battle of the Summer Islands, from the simple circumstance that he represents himself in that poem not as having yet seen Bermuda, but as longing and hoping to do so1. My own belief is, that the astute Waller, having property on the islands, and having, as I should conjecture, embarked money in the company which was started in 1637, under the auspices of Governor Chaddock, wrote his heroic poem, and circulated it among wealthy and noble friends, as an advertisement. Until that time, passion, ambition, the urging sense of harmony or beauty, had inspired English heroic poems; but this was in future to be 1 His words are: "O how I long my careless limbs to lay Invoke the Muses, and improve my vein!" My conviction is that he no more reached Bermuda than George Herbert or Bishop Berkeley did. These islands have attracted much notice from English men of letters, but have proved difficult of access. Tom Moore reached them, but quitted them soon and eagerly. by no means de rigueur. Half a century later, when the classical transformation was almost complete, Hobbes in his essay Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem laid down as the first rule for its composition that it should possess "perspicuity and facility of construction." The heroic poems of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages,―The Barons' Wars of Drayton, the Albion's England of Warner, the Ovid's Banquet of Sense of Chapman, for instance, had possessed various brilliant and touching qualities, irregular force and sudden brilliance of style, but certainly not what Hobbes means by "perspicuity and facility of construction." The Arcadia of Sidney is not facile, the Christ's Victory and Triumph of Giles Fletcher is not, in this sense, perspicuous, but Waller's Battle of the Summer Islands is, just as The Hind and the Panther of Dryden is perspicuous, and The Dunciad admirable for its facility of construction. Waller's little epic is a perfectly straightforward narration in three parts, the first containing a highly-pitched description, the exaggerated fulsomeness of which irritates the historian of the Bermudas, of the commercial and natural advantages of that colony; the second containing an account of the stranding of the whales; and the third of the battle itself. Nothing could be pitched |