Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

by Unknown

ABOUT AND ROUNDABOUT

In Mr. Nahum's The Other Worlde, as I have said on page xxx, there were many passages written about and roundabout the poems contained in it. Some of these I copied out. With others that I have added since, they appear in the following pages. If the reader prefer poems and poems only in such a collection as this, would he of his kindness and courtesy ignore everything else? Otherwise, will he please forgive any blunders he may discover?

[1]. "This is the Key."

This jingle (like Nos. 15, 16 and others) is one of hundreds of nursery and dandling rhymes which I found in Mr. Nahum's book. Compared with more formal poems they are like wild flowers—pimpernel, eyebright, thyme, woodruff, and others even tinier, even quieter, but having their own private and complete little beauty if looked at closely. Who made them, how old they are; nobody knows. But when Noah's Ark stranded on the slopes of Mount Ararat, maybe a blossoming weed or two was nodding at the open third-storey window out of which over the waters of the flood the dove had followed the raven, and there, rejoicing in the sunshine and the green, sat Japheth's wife dandling little Magog on her lap, and crooning him some such lullaby.

[3].

On the one side is printed the old Scots, and on the other the best I can do to put it into the English of our own time. According to the dictionary the thistle-cock that cries shame on the sleepers still drowsing in their beds is the corn-bunting— a cousin of the yellow-hammer. He has a small harsh monotonous voice as if for the very purpose. Whereas the nightingale might seem to cry, "Nay, nay: it is in dreams you wander. Happy ones! Sleep on; sleep on."

[4]. "I passed by his Garden."

Whatever fate befell the Sluggard, I should like to have taken a walk in his garden, among those branching thistles, green thorns and briers. Maybe he sailed off at last to the Isle of Nightmare, or to the land where it is always afternoon, or was wrecked in Yawning Gap. He must, at any rate, have had an even heavier head than Dr. Watts supposed if he never so much as lifted it from his pillow to brood awhile on that still, verdurous scene. And the birds!

Indeed, to lie, between sleep and wake, when daybreak is brightening of an April or a May morning, and so listen to the far-away singing of a thrush or to the whistling of a robin or a wren is to seem to be transported back into the garden of Eden. Dreamers, too, may call themselves travellers.

Mr. Nahum's picture to this rhyme was of a man in rags looking into a small round mirror or looking-glass, but at what you couldn't see.

[6]. "The Merchant bows" (line 7)

—(as do the happy to the New Moon, for luck), for his merchandise is being wafted over the sea under the guidance of the Seaman's, or Ship, or Lode, or Pole Star. It shines in the constellation of the Little Bear, and "is the cheefe marke whereby mariners governe their course in saylings by nyghte." To find the "marke," look towards the north some cloudless night for the constellation of Seven Stars called the Plough or the Dipper or Charles's Wain (or Waggon), which "enclyneth his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde" day and night throughout the year. Its hinder stars (Dubhe and Merak) are named "the pointers," because if you follow the line of them with the eye into the empty skies, the next brightish star it will alight on is the Seaman's Star. Close beside the second of the seven is a mere speck of a star. And that is called by country people Jack-by-the-middle-horse. On this same star looked Shakespeare—as did the 1st Carrier in his Henry IV.: "Heigh-ho, an't be not foure by the day, He be hanged. Charles' waine is over the near Chimney, and yet our horse not packt"; and as did his 2nd Gentleman in Othello:

Montano.What from the Cape can you discerne at Sea?

1st Gentleman.Nothing at all, it is a high-wrought Flood:

I cannot 'twixt the Heaven, and the Maine

Descry a Saile....

2nd Gentleman.... Do but stand upon the Foaming Shore,

The chidden Billow seemes to pelt the Clowds,

The wind-shaked-Surge, with high and monstrous Maine,

Seemes to cast water on the burning Beare,

And quench the Guards of the ever-fixèd Pole.

I never did like mollestation view

On the enchafèd Flood....

Faintly shimmering, too, in the northern heavens is that other numerous starry cluster, known the world over as Seven—to us as the Seven Sisters or the Pleiades. A strange seven; for only six stars are now clearly visible to the naked eye, one having vanished, it would seem, within human memory. When? where?—none can tell. They play in light as close together as dewdrops in a cobweb hung from thorn to thorn. Nearby, on winter's cold breast burns the most marvellous of the constellations—the huntsman Orion, with his Rigel and Bellatrix and Betelgeuse; his dog Sirius at his heels. "Seek him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night...."

[9]. "Like a Child, Half in Tenderness and Mirth."

At a first reading, perhaps, this line will not appear to flow so smoothly as the rest. But linger an instant on the word child, and you will have revealed to yourself one of Shelley's, and indeed one of every poet's loveliest devices with words—to let the music of his verse accord with its meaning, and at the same time to please and charm the ear with a slight variation from the regular beat and accent of the metre. So, too, in the middle lines of the next stanza. This variation, which is called rhythm, is the very proof of its writer's sincerity. For if the sound of his verse (or of his voice) rings false, he cannot have completely realised what he was writing or saying. When a man says what he means, he says it as if he meant it. The tune of what he says sounds right. When a man does not mean what he says, he finds it all but impossible to say it as if he did. The tune goes wrong.

Just so with reading. So from a gay and tiny Compendious English Grammar of 1780 I have borrowed these four brief wholesome rules for reading:

(1) ... Observe well the pauses, accents and emphases; and never stop but where the sense will admit of it.

(2) Humour your voice a little, according to the subject....

(3) Do not read too fast, lest [in lip or mind] you get a habit of stammering; adding or omitting words; and be sure that your understanding keep pace with your tongue.

(4) In reading Verse, pronounce every word just as if it were prose, observing the stops with great exactness, and giving each word its proper accent; and if it be not harmonious, the Poet, and not the Reader, is to blame."

Better, perhaps, be sure of your ear before you blame the poet. But in general, if these rules are followed, there can be little danger of reading like a parrot, or like a small boy in his first breeches at a Dame's school. To think while one reads; that is the main thing: so as not to be, as Sidney says,—just

... like a child that some fair book doth find,

With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays,

Or, at the most, on some fair pictures stays,

But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind.

[13]. "Comes dancing from the East."

I found a story about this dancing in Mrs. Wright's Rustic Speech and Folklore. It is the story of a woman who lived in a district called Hockley, in the parish of Broseley. She said that she had heard of such "dancing" but did not believe it to be true, "till on Easter morning last, I got up early, and then I saw the sun dance, and dance, and dance, three times, and I called to my husband and said, 'Rowland, Rowland, get up and see the sun dance!' I used," she said, "not to believe it, but now I can never doubt more." The neighbours agreed with her that the sun did dance on Easter morning, and that some of them had seen it. "Seeing," goes the old proverb, "is believing"—which is true no less of the "inward eye." I once tried to comfort a very little boy who was unhappy because there was a Bear under his bed. Candle in hand, I talked and talked, and proved that there wasn't a real bear for miles and miles around, not at any rate until we reached the Zoo, and there—black, brown, sloth, spectacled, grizzly and polar alike—all of them, poor creatures, were cabined, cribbed and shut up in barred cages. He listened, tears still shining in his eyes, his small face sharp and clear. "Why certainly, certainly not," I ended, "there can't be a real bear for miles around!" He smiled as if pitying me. "Ah yes, Daddie," he answered with a die-away sob, "but, you see, you's talking of real bears, and mine wasn't real."

[14]. "Us Idle Wenches."

It was a jolly bed in sooth,

Of oak as strong as Babel.

And there slept Kit and Sall and Ruth

As sound as maids are able.

Ay—three in one—and there they dreamed,

Their bright young eyes hid under;

Nor hearkened when the tempest streamed

Nor recked the rumbling thunder.

For marvellous regions strayed they in,

Each moon-far from the other—

Ruth in her childhood, Kit in heaven,

And Sall with ghost for lover.

But soon as ever sun shone sweet,

And birds sang, Praise for rain, O—

Leapt out of bed three pair of feet

And danced on earth again, O!

[17.] Old May Song.

This, like No. 2, and the next song must be as old as the dew-ponds on the Downs. They were wont to be sung, I have read, by five or six men, with a fiddle, or flute, or clarionet accompaniment. When I was a boy I can remember one First of May seeing a Jack-in-the-Green in the street—a man in a kind of wicker cage hung about with flowers and leaves—with Maid Marian. Friar Tuck and the rest, dancing and singing beside him. A great friend of mine, when she was a little girl of eight, was so frightened at sight of this leafy prancing creature on her way to school that she turned about and ran for a mile without stopping.

[19.]

There is far too little of Geoffrey Chaucer's—that most lovable, shrewd, compassionate, and natural of poets—in this book. There was much more of him, I noticed, in Mr. Nahum's Tome II. At first sight his words look a little strange; but not for long; and if every dotted letter is made a syllable of, his rhythm will flow like water over bright green waterweed.

It is a curious, though little thing, that while, among the one hundred and seventy varieties of flowers Shakespeare mentions, he has no less than fifty-seven several references to the rose, twenty-one to the green grass, eighteen to violets, and even to the serviceable but rank nettle a round dozen, he has but a scant five to Chaucer's beloved daisy. Flowers, it is true, as says Canon Ellacombe (who collected all such references into his delight-full book, Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare), never sweeten the Plays for their own sake alone, and there are no foxgloves, snowdrops or forget-me-nots in them at all. Still, had he loved daisies as children do, he could hardly have resisted them even for "their own sake alone." Is not bairnwort another name for the daisy?

"A yellow cup, it hath," says Pliny, "and the same is crowned, as it were with a garland, consisting of five and fifty little leaves, set round about it in manner of fine pales. These be flowers of the meadow, and most of such are of no use at all." No use at all, none—except only to make skylark of every heart whose owner has eyes in his head for a daisy's simple looks, its marvellous making, and the sheer happiness of their multitudes wide open in the sun or round-headed and adrowse in the evening twilight.

Chaucer's picture portrait is well known. So is that in his own words in the Canterbury Tales. But here is another, less familiar, by Robert Greene—of "Sir Jeffery Chaucer," as he calls him. Water chamlet is a rich coloured silken plush, and a whittell is a knife:

His stature was not very tall,

Leane he was, his legs were small,

Hosed within a stock of red

A buttoned bonnet on his head,

From under which did hang, I weene,

Silver haires both bright and sheene,

His beard was white, trimmèd round,

His count'nance blithe and merry found,

A Sleevelesse Iacket large and wide,

With many pleights and skirts Side,

Of water Chamlet did he weare,

A whittell by his belt he beare,

His shooes were cornèd broad before,

His Inkhorne at his side he wore,

And in his hand he bore a booke,

Thus did this auntient Poet looke.

[20]. "Brave Prick-Song"

—which means, I gather, that while the nightingale was—even into the dusk of dawn—yet singing her "air" or "descant," the lark joined in as if reading her notes from the daybreak stars pricking the sky.

[21]. "Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu we, to witta woo!"

Four birds, I suppose, have part in this: cuckoo, nightingale (yoog, yoog), green-finch (?) and owl.

I rose anon, and thought I wouldė gone

Into the woods, to hear the birdis sing,

When that the misty vapour was agone,

And cleare and fairė was the morrowing;

The dew, also, like silver in shining,

Upon the leaves, as any baumė sweet.

---

And in I went to hear the birdis song,

Which on the branches, both in plain and vale,

So loudly y-sang, that all the wood y-rang,

Like as it should shiver in pieces smale;

And as me thoughten that the nightingale

With so great might her voice began out-wrest,

Right as her heart for love would all to-brest.

John Lydgate

[22]. "The Jealous Trout."

Thou that desir'st to fish with line and hook,

Be it in pool, in river, or in brook,

To bless thy bait and make the fish to bite,

Lo, here's a means! if thou canst hit it right:

Take Gum of Life, fine beat, and laid in soak

In oil well drawn from that which kills the oak,

Fish where thou wilt, thou shalt have sport thy fill;

When twenty fail, thou shalt be sure to kill.

It's perfect and good,

If well understood;

Else not to be told

For silver or gold.

So advises Master Will. Lauson in the Secrets of Angling, which was published in 1653; the ingredients (or ingrediments as I used to say when I was a child) of his "gum of life" being Cocculus Juliæ, Assafoetida, Honey, and Wheat-flour. The "that which kills the oak," I suppose, is ivy. But it looks as if there may have been a wink in his eye—to welcome the green in his reader's.

Here, on the same theme, are a few lines from a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges:

... Sometimes an angler comes, and drops his hook

Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree

Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,

Forgetting soon his pride of fishery,

And dreams, or falls asleep,

While curious fishes peep

About his nibbled bait, or scornfully

Dart off and rise and leap....

And these are by J. Wolcot:

Why flyest thou away with fear?

Trust me there's naught of danger near,

I have no wicked hooke

All covered with a snaring bait,

Alas, to tempt thee to thy fate,

And dragge thee from the brooke....

Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;

And when an angler for his dish,

Through gluttony's vile sin,

Attempts, a wretch, to pull thee out,

God give thee strength, O gentle trout,

To pull the raskall in!

A less common and more skilful sport than fly, hook and bait, or even "tickling" can afford is to share their watery chaos with the fish, and catch them with the hands. This needs rare skill and cunning and—a disguise! "For dyeing of your hairs," says Isaac Walton in The Compleat Angler, "do it thus: Take a pint of strong ale, half a pound of soot, and a little quantity of the juice of walnut-tree leaves, and an equal quantity of alum; put these together, into a pot, pan, or pipkin, and boil them half an hour; and having so done, let it cool; and being cold, put your hair into it, and there let it lie; it will turn your hair to be a kind of water or glass-colour or greenish; and the longer you let it lie, the deeper coloured it will be. You might be taught to make many other colours, but it is to little purpose; for doubtless the water-colour or glass-coloured hair is the most choice and the most useful for an angler, but let it not be too green."

"And Birds had drawn their Valentines." (line 4)

First thing in the early morning, if you go out on St. Valentine's Day, which is the 14th day of February, you will meet, if you meet anybody, your soon-to-be-loved one. So too the birds. In my young days, folks sent the daintiest pictures to their sweethearts on this day. Mr. Nahum had a drawer half full of them—with a few locks of hair and some withered flowers. And one or two of these Valentines were of beaten gold, with images of lovely things upon them, as if from another planet.

"This morning came up to my wife's bedside, I being up dressing myself, little Will Mercer to be her Valentine; and brought her name writ upon blue paper in gold letters, done by himself, very pretty...." Mr. Samuel Pepys's Diary.

To-morrow is S. Valentine's day,

All in the morning betime,

And I a Maid at your Window

To be your Valentine!

Ophelia's Song.

"Joan Strokes a Sillabub or Twain."

If you would make a Lemon Sillabub (as advised by Mrs. Charlotte Mason, "a Professed Housekeeper, who from about 1740 had upwards of Thirty Years experience in Families of the First Fashion") take "a Pint of cream, a pint of white wine, the rind of two lemons grated, and the juice. Sugar to the taste. Let it stand some time; mill or whip it. Lay the froth on a sieve; put the remainder into glasses. Lay on the froth." Mr. Nahum must have had a fancy for Cookery Books; there were dozens of them in his tower room. Indeed, the next best thing to eating a good dish is to read how it is made; and somehow the old "cookbook" writers learned to write a most excellent and appetising English. Here is another recipe from Delightes for Ladies, of 1608—a dainty that would eat uncommonly well with a sillabub:—"To make a marchpane.—Take two poundes of almonds being blanched, and dryed in a sieve over the fire, beate them in a stone mortar, and when they bee small mixe them with two pounde of sugar beeing finely beaten, adding two or three spoonefuls of rosewater, and that will keep your almonds from oiling: when your paste is beaten fine, drive it thin with a rowling pin, and so lay it on a bottom of wafers, then raise up a little edge on the side, and so bake it, then yce it with rosewater and sugar, then put it in the oven again, and when you see your yce is risen up and drie, then take it out of the oven and garnish it with pretie conceipts, as birdes and beasts being cast out of standing moldes. Sticke long comfits upright in it, cast biskets and carrowaies in it, and so serve it; guild it before you serve it: you may also print of this marchpane paste in your molds for banqueting dishes. And of this paste our comfit makers at this day make their letters, knots, armes, escutcheons, beasts, birds, and other fancies." Also pygmy castles and suchlike, for dessert, which the guests would demolish with sugar-plums.

"Good thou, save mee a piece of Marchpane, and as thou lovest me, let the Porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell...."

Romeo and Juliet

[23]. "The Sun arising."

"What other fire could be a better image of the fire which is there, than the fire which is here? Or what other earth than this, of the earth which is there?" So said Plotinus, and "I know," said Blake, "that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.... Some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision." ... Indeed, when Blake was a child, he saw on Peckham Rye a tree, full, not of birds, but of angels; and his poems show how marvellously clear were the eyes with which he looked at the things of Nature.

In the year 1872, an old lady might have been seen driving across the Rye in her silvery carriage; and she came to where, under a flowering tree, sat a small boy—the locks of hair upon his head like sheaves of cowslips, his eyes like speedwells, and he in very bright clothes. And he was a-laughing up into the tree. She stopped her carriage and said to him almost as if she were more angry than happy, "What are you laughing at, child?" And he said, "At the sparrows, ma'am." "Mere sparrows!" says she, "but why?" "Because they were saying," says he, "here comes across the Rye a blind old horse, a blind old coachman, and a blind old woman." "But I am not blind," says she. "Nor are they not 'mere sparrows'," said the child. And at that the old lady was looking out of her carriage at no child, but at a small bush, in bud, of gorse.

[24]. "And Thank Him Then"

—as does Robert Herrick's child, in his "Grace":

Here a little child I stand,

Heaving up my either hand;

Cold as Paddocks though they be,

Here I lift them up to Thee,

For a Benizon to fall

On our meat, and on us all. Amen.

A paddock is a frog or a toad, it seems. To either small cold hand there are four cold fingers and a thumb; and in old times, says Halliwell, our ancestors had distinct names for each of the five toes and for each of the five fingers. The fingers were called thumb, toucher, longman, leche-man, little-man: leche-man being the ring-finger, because in that "there is a sinew very tender and small that reaches to the heart." In Essex they used to call them (and still may)—Tom Thumbkin, Bess Bumpkin, Long Linkin, Bill Wilkin, and Little Dick. In Scotland: Thumbkin, Lickpot, Langman, Berrybarn and Pirlie Winkie.

And here are some more from Dr. Courtenay Dunn's Natural History of the Child—a book which is graced with as handsome a frontispiece as ever I've seen:

Thumb	- Tommy Tomkins	or Bill Milker.
Forefinger	- Billy Wilkins	" Tom Thumper.
Third finger	- Long Larum	" Long lazy.
Fourth finger	- Betsy Bedlam	" Cherry Bumper.
Little finger	- Little Bob	" Tippity, Tippity-Town-end.

Toes:

Big toe	- Tom Barker	or Toe Tipe.
Toe 2	- Long Rachel	" Penny Wipe.
Toe 3	- Minnie Wilkin	" Tommy Tistle.
Toe 4	- Milly Larkin	" Billy Whistle.
Little toe	- Little Dick	" Tripping-go.

So (if you wish) you can secretly name not only your fingers, toes, rooms, chairs and tables, etc., but also the stars in their courses, the trees in your orchard, and have your own privy countersign for the flowers you like best. "Give a dog a bad name, and hang him," says the old proverb. Give anything a good name, and it is yours for ever. There is the tale of the unhappy gardener in the Isle of Rumm who without ill intention called a snapdragon an antirrhinum. And there arose out of the hillside a Monster named Zobj—but I haven't the space for the rest. The gardener of course meant well; but when he heard the Voice counting his last moments, not in common English, but in what Wensleydale Knitters still remember of the Norse—Yahn, Jyahn, Tether, Mether, Mumph, Hither, Lither, Auver, Dauver, Die—well, he died before he was due, so to speak.

While we are on this subject, here is a Face Rhyme:

Bo Peeper

Nose Dreeper

Chin Chopper

White Lopper

Red Rag

And Little Gap.

This is another:

Here sits the Lord Mayor:

Here sit his men;

Here sits the cockadoodle;

Here sits the hen;

Here sits the little chickens;

Here they run in;

Chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper chin.

The next three are foot rhymes, very soothing at times to fractious babies. The first is common in London, etc.:

This little pig went to market;

This little pig stayed at home;

This little pig had roast beef;

This little pig had the bone;

This little pig cried Wee-wee-wee-wee-wee!

All the way home.

The second comes from the Isle of Wight:

This gurt pig zays, I wants meat;

T'other one zays, Where'll ye hay et?

This one zays, In gramfer's barn;

T'other one zays, Week! Week! I can't get over the dreshel.

And this is from Scotland:

This ain biggit the baurn,

This ain stealt the corn,

This ain stood and saw,

This ain ran awa',

An' wee Pirlie Winkie paid for a'.

And last; here is a dance-babbie-on-knee (or This-is-the-way) rhyme; also from Scotland:

The doggies gaed to the mill,

This way and that way;

They took a lick out o' this wife's poke

And they took a lick out o' that wife's poke,

And a loup in the lead, and a dip in the dam,

And gaed walloping, walloping, walloping, Hame.

And no doubt came to the conclusion expressed in the sixth stanza of Robert Herrick's Ternary of Littles, upon a Pipkin of Jelly sent to a Lady:

A little Saint best fits a little Shrine,

A little Prop best fits a little Vine,

As my small Cruse best fits my little Wine.

A little Seed best fits a little Soyle,

A little Trade best fits a little Toyle,

As my small Jarre best fits my little Oyle.

A little Bin best fits a little Bread,

A little Garland fits a little Head,

As my small stuffe best fits my little Shed.

A little Hearth best fits a little Fire,

A little Chappell fits a little Quire,

As my small Bell best fits my little Spire.

A little streame best fits a little Boat,

A little lead best fits a little Float,

As my small Pipe best fits my little note.

A little meat best fits a little bellie,

As sweetly, Lady, give me leave to tell ye,

This little Pipkin fits this little Jellie.

And the fact that this or any other poem is printed at this end of the book instead of at the other does not mean that I am any the less thankful to have it or that Mr. Nahum left it out of his.

[25]. "I Sing of a Maiden."

Only the spelling of this lovely and ancient little carol has been slightly changed.

[29]. "Sleep Stays Not, Though a Monarch Bids."
(line 11).

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,

Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,

Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,

Under the canopies of costly state,

And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?

O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile

In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch

A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,

That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And in the calmest and most stillest night,

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV. Part ii.

[30].

For many years I read this poem as if the accents in the first line of each stanza fell on the first and third word—the two "I's." It was stupid of me, for clearly the accent should fall (lightly) on the second syllable of the "remembers." Apart from the accents or stresses in a line of verse, there is the rise and fall of the voice, a kind of tune in the saying of it. If the right tune is not caught, then the difference is as much as if one sniffed a wallflower and it smelt like African mimosa. And to me, as to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, this poem is as familiar, long-endeared and refreshing as wallflower, Sweet William, or Old Man. This is the second or third time I have made remarks about the rhythm, lilt or tune of a poem; and it won't be the last. May I be forgiven, for as Chaucer wrote to his small son Louis when he was sharing with him his love of astronomy: "Soothly me seemeth betre to writen unto a child twice a good sentence, then he forget it ones." As for his elders, even thrice may be short commons.

"Those Flowers made of Light." (line 12)

Hold up a flower between eye and sun, or even candle-flame, and it seems little but its own waxen hue and colour. Moonlight is too pale; the petals remain opaque. In the moon's light, indeed, blueness is scarcely distinguishable from shadowiness; red darkens but yellow pales, and the fairest flowers of all wake in her beams—jasmine, convolvulus, evening-primrose—as if they not only shared her radiance but returned a glowwormlike fuminess of their own.

Once, long before I came to Thrae, having plucked for my mother a few convolvulus flowers, I remember when I was just about to give them into her hand I discovered that the beautiful cups of delight had enwreathed themselves together, and had returned as it were to the bud, never to reopen. I was but a child, and this odd little disappointment was so extreme that I burst out crying.

[32].

See just above, No. 30: and for proof of the curious obedience of words to any bidden rhythm it is interesting to compare this poem with its next neighbours. Mr. Frost's colt is called "a little Morgan," because he was of a famous breed of horses of that name which are the pride of the State of Vermont.

[35].

Only a single copy of the old play, Mundus et Infans, from which this fragment is taken, is known to be in existence. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1522; and was written roundabout 1500.

The lines need a slow reading to get the run and lilt of them: and even at that they jog and creak like an old farm-cart. But the boy, Dalyaunce, if one takes a little pains, will come gradually out of them as clear to the eye as if you had met him in the street to-day, on his way to "schole" for yet another "docking."

Clothes, houses, customs, food a little, thoughts a little, knowledge, too—all change as the years and centuries go by, but Dalyaunce under a thousand names lives on. It never occurred to me when I was young to think that the children in Rome talked Latin at their games, and that Solomon and Caesar, Prester John and the Grand Khan knew in their young days what it means to be homesick and none too easy to sit down. Yet there are knucklebones and dolls in London that the infant subjects of the Pharaohs played with, and at Stratford Grammar School, for all to see, is Shakespeare's school desk. As for Dalyaunce, "dockings" are not nowadays so harsh as once they were.

In proof of this, there is a passage from a book, telling of his own life as a small boy, written by Guibert de Nogent. He is speaking of his childhood, about the year when William the Conqueror landed at Hastings:

'So, after a few of the evening hours had been passed in that study, during which I had been beaten even beyond my deserts, I came and sat at my mother's knees. She, according to her wont, asked whether I had been beaten that day; and I, unwilling to betray my master, denied it; whereupon, whether I would or no, she threw back my inner garment (such as men call shirt), and found my little ribs black with the strokes of the osier, and rising everywhere into weals. Then, grieving in her inmost bowels at this punishment so excessive for my tender years, troubled and boiling with anger, and with brimming eyes, she cried, "Never now shalt thou become a clerk, nor shalt thou be thus tortured again to learn thy letters!" Whereupon, gazing upon her with all the seriousness that I could call to my face, I replied, "Nay, even though I should die under the rod, I will not desist from learning my letters and becoming a clerk!"'

Still, there were more merciful schoolmasters than Guibert de Nogent's, even in days harsh as his; as this further extract from Mr. G. G. Coulton's enticing Medieval Garner shows:

'One day, when a certain Abbot, much reputed for his piety, spake with Anselm concerning divers points of Monastic Religion, and conversed among other things of the boys that were brought up in the cloister, he added: "What, pray, can we do with them? They are perverse and incorrigible; day and night we cease not to chastise them, yet they grow daily worse and worse."

Whereat Anselm marvelled, and said, "Ye cease not to beat them? And when they are grown to manhood, of what sort are they then?" "They are dull and brutish," said the other.

Then said Anselm, "With what good profit do ye expend your substance in nurturing human beings till they become brute beasts?... But I prithee tell me, for God's sake, wherefore ye are so set against them? Are they not human, sharing in the same nature as yourselves? Would ye wish to be so handled as ye handle them? Ye will say, 'Yes, if we were as they are.' So be it, then; yet is there no way but that of stripes and scourges for shaping them to good? Did ye ever see a goldsmith shape his gold or silver plate into a fair image by blows alone? I trow not. What then? That he may give the plate its proper shape, he will first press it gently and tap it with his tools; then again he will more softly raise it with discreet pressure from below, and caress it into shape. So ye also, if ye would see your boys adorned with fair manners, ye should not only beat them down with stripes, but also raise their spirits and support them with fatherly kindness and pity'...."

There was an old woodcut, hanging on Mr. Nahum's wall in his tower room, showing a boy in the middle ages being whipped in a kind of machine (something like a roasting-jack), and a schoolmaster standing by, nicely smiling, in a gown. When Coleridge was a bluecoat boy at Christ's Hospital with Charles Lamb, he seems to have had a headmaster of this kind: "'Boy!' I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day after my return after the holidays,—'Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying.' ...

"Mrs. Bowyer was no comforter, either. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us, by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in and said, 'Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!' This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, 'Away, woman, away!' and we were let off."

Coleridge tells of yet another schoolmaster, whose name, like Bowyer and birch, also began with a B.: "Busby was the father of the English public school system. He was headmaster of Westminster through the reign of Charles I., the Civil War, the Protectorate, the reign of Charles II., and the Revolution of 1688. Under him Westminster became the first school in the kingdom. When Charles II. visited the school, Busby stalked before the King with his hat upon his head, whilst his most sacred majesty meekly followed him. In private Busby explained that his conduct was due to the fact that he could not allow, for discipline's sake, the boys to imagine there could be a greater man than himself alive." Quite rightly, of course.

There is, too, the story of the little Lion that went to school to the Bear. Being, though of royal blood, a good deal of a dunce, Master Lion bore many sound cuffings from Dr. Bruin on the road to learning, and found it hot and dusty. After such administrations, he would sometimes sit in the sun under a window, learning his task and brooding on a day when he would return to the school and revenge himself upon the Doctor for having treated him so sore. But Master Lion was all this time growing up, and so many were the cares of State when he had left his books and become a Prince and Heir Apparent, that for a time he had no thought for his old school. Being, however, in the Royal Gardens one sunny morning, and seeing bees busy about their hive, he remembered an old saying on the sweetness of knowledge and wisdom, and this once more reminded him of his old Master. Bidding his servants sling upon a rod half a dozen of the hives, he set out to visit Dr. Bruin. The hives were taken into his study, and the bees, being unused to flitting within walls out of the sunshine, angrily sang and droned about the head of the old schoolmaster as he sat at his desk. Their stings were of little account against his thick hide, but their molestation was a fret, and he presently cried aloud, "Would that the Prince had kept his gifts to himself!" The Prince, who was standing outside the door, listening and smiling to himself, thereupon cried out: "Ah! Dr. Bruin, when I was under your charge, you often heavily smit and cuffed me with those long-clawed paws of yours. Now I am older, and have learned how sweet and worthy is the knowledge they instilled. This too will be your experience. My bees may fret and buzz and sting a little now, but you will think of me more kindly when you shall be tasting their rich honey in the Winter that is soon upon us." And Dr. Bruin, peering out at the Prince from amid the cloud of the bees, when he heard him thus call Tit for Tat, he couldn't help but laugh.

And last—to return to Coleridge once more, who, in the bad old days, so far as food goes, never "had a belly full" at Christ's Hospital, and whose appetite was only "damped, never satisfied,"—here is one of his earliest letters (to his elder brother George), which may have an (indirect) reference to Dr. Bowyer's birch:

Dear Brother,—You will excuse me for reminding you that, as our holidays commence next week, and I shall go out a good deal, a good pair of breeches will be no inconsiderable accession to my appearance. For though my present pair are excellent for the purpose of drawing mathematical figures on them, and though a walking thought, sonnet or epigram would appear in them in very splendid type, yet they are not altogether so well adapted for a female eye—not to mention that I should have the charge of vanity brought against me for wearing a looking-glass. I hope you have got rid of your cold—and I am

Your affectionate brother,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[40].

This too should go to the lilt of its music, as then the accents would come clearly. I think, in the reading of it, there should be four stressed syllables to the first, second and fifth lines in each stanza: " Whâr hae ye bêen a' day, mŷ boy Tâmmy"; and "The wêe thing gie's her hând, and says, There, gâng and ask my Mâmmy." A line of verse like this resembles a piece of elastic; if you leave it very slack you will get no music out of it at all; stretch it a little too far, it snaps.

[41]. "Rosy Apple, Lemon, or Pear."

This little jingle and Nos. 15, 16, 68, 75, etc., are Singing Game Rhymes, of which scores have been collected from the mouths of children near and far from all over the Kingdom, and are now to be found in print in Lady Gomme's two stout engrossing volumes entitled Traditional Games. In these more than seven hundred games are described, including Rakes and Roans, Rockety Row, Sally Go Round the Moon, Shuttlefeather, Spannims, Tods and Lambs, Whigmeleerie, Allicomgreenaie, Bob-Cherry, Oranges and Lemons, Cherry Pit, Thumble-bones, Lady on Yandor Hill, Hechefragy, and Snail Creep.

A good many of these games have singing rhymes to them. And the words of them vary in different places. For the children in each of twenty or more villages and towns may have their own particular version of the same rhyme. As for the original from which all such versions must once have come—that may be centuries old. Like the Nursery Rhymes, they were most of them in the world ages before our great-great-great-grand-dams were babies in their cradles. The noble game of Hop Scotch, for instance, Lady Gomme tells us, was in favour before the year I.

The most mysterious rhymes of all are said to refer to ancient tribal customs, rites and ceremonies—betrothals, harvest-homes, sowings, reapings, well-blessings, dirges, divinations, battles, hunting, and exorcisings—before even London was else than a few hovels by its river's side. Rhymes such as these having been passed on from age to age and from one piping throat to another, have grown worn and battered of course, and become queerly changed in their words.

These from Mr. Nahum's book have their own differences too. He seems to have liked best those that make a picture, or sound uncommonly sweet and so carry the fancy away. Any little fytte or jingle or jargon of words that manages that is like a charm or a talisman, and to make new ones is as hard as to spin silk out of straw, or to turn beech leaves into fairy money. When one thinks, too, of the myriad young voices that generation after generation have carolled these rhymes into the evening air, and now are still—well, it's a thought no less sorrowful for being strange, and no less strange for the fact that our own voices too will some day be as silent.

Summer's pleasures they are gone like to visions every one,

And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.

I tried to call them back, but unbidden they are gone

Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away.

Dear heart, and can it be that such raptures meet decay?

I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay,

I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play

On its bank at "clink and bandy," "chock" and "taw" and "ducking stone,"

Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own

Like a ruin of the past all alone....

John Clare

[42]. "In Praise."

The loveliest and gayest song of praise and sweetness to a "young thing" I have ever seen.

"Ielofler"—gelofer, gelofre, gillofre, gelevor, gillyvor, gillofer, jerefloure, gerraflour—all these are ways of spelling Gillyflower, gelofre coming nearest to its original French: giroflée—meaning spiced like the clove. There were of old, I find, three kinds of gillyflowers: the clove, the stock and the wall. It was the first of these kinds that was meant in the earlier writers by the small clove carnation (or Coronation, because it was made into chaplets or garlands). Its Greek name was dianthus (the flower divine); and its twin-sister is the Pink, so called because its edges are, as it were, picked out, jagged, notched, scalloped. Country names for it are Sweet John, Pagiants, Blunket and Sops-in-Wine, for it spices what it floats in, and used to be candied for a sweetmeat. Blossoming in July, the Gillyflower suggests July-flower, and if Julia is one's sweetheart, it may also be a Julie-flower. So one name may carry many echoes. It has been truly described as a gimp and gallant flower, and, says Parkinson, who wrote Paradisus Terrestris, it was the chiefest of account in Tudor gardens. By 1700 indeed there were 360 kinds and four classes of clove gillyflower—the Flake, the Bizarre, the Piquette or picotee (picotée or pricketed), and the Painted Lady, the last now gone. Its ancestor, the dianthus, seems to have crossed the Channel with the Normans, for it flourishes on the battlements of Falaise, the Conqueror's birthplace, and crowns the walls of many a Norman Castle—Dover, Ludlow, Rochester, Deal—to this day.

[43]. "Pygsnye"

must be Piggie's eye, or, from an old word, Twinkle-eye, just as we nowadays call a child or loved-one Goosikins or Pussikins, or Lambkin Pie, or Bunch-of-Roses, or Chickabiddy, or Come-kiss-me-quick. Minion means anything small, minikin, delicate, dainty, darling. Look close, for example, at the brown-green florets of a stalk of mignonette.

[44]. "A Worm's Light." (line 10)

Many years ago I had the curious pleasure of reading a little book—and one in small print too (Alice Meynell's lovely Flower of the Mind)—by English glowworm light. The worm was lifting its green beam in the grasses of a cliff by the sea, and shone the clearer the while because it was during an eclipse of the moon. But see No. 93.

[50]. "But Never Cam' He."

... "O wha will shoe my bonny foot?

And wha will glove my hand?

And wha will lace my middle jimp,

Wi' a lang, lang linen band?

"O who will kame my yellow hair,

With a haw bayberry kame?

And wha will be my babe's father,

Till Gregory come hame?"

"Thy father, he will shoe thy foot,

Thy brother will glove thy hand,

Thy mother will bind thy middle jimp

Wi' a lang, lang linen band!

"Thy sister will kame thy yellow hair,

Wi' a haw bayberry kame;

The Almighty will be thy babe's father,

Till Gregory come hame."...

"Haw" is an old English word meaning (?) blue or braw, and bayberry is the all-spice tree; so this sad one's yellow hair had for comb an uncommonly charming thing. In another version the comb is of "new silver," and in a third it is a red river kame, which, thinks Mr. Child, may be a corruption of red ivory. But give me (for such hair) the bayberry kind, and let it be haw.

[51]. "The Orphan."

"The first sense of sorrow I ever knew," wrote Richard Steele, "was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling, papa; for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces; and told me in a flood of tears, 'Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again.'"

[53].

The first and third stanzas of this poem were (and are) my particular favourites, and especially the second line in each. Such poems are like wayside pools, or little well-springs of water. It does not matter how many wayfarers come thither to quench their thirst, there is abundance for all.

"The Perishing Pleasures of Man." (line 18)

"But you mustn't imagine," said the old old Harper, "that I harp sad memories on my harp-strings because, being an ancient I am envious of my youth. Far from it. My only grief is that even if mine were the Harp that hung in Tara, I could not express the joy it is to be of years an hundred, and to remember that once I was nought—and all in the same bar."

And for yet another look behind, I cannot leave out this little rhyme from William Allingham, who made one of the happiest of all anthologies, "Nightingale Valley":

Four ducks on a pond,

A grass-bank beyond,

A blue sky of spring,

White clouds on the wing;

What a little thing

To remember for years—

To remember with tears.

Or, last, this lovely scrap from the Scots—all distance and longing for home:

O Alva hills is bonny,

Dalycoutry hills is fair,

But to think on the braes of Menstrie

It maks my heart fu' sair.

[60].

Edward Thomas, who wrote this poem, knew by heart most of the villages, streams, high roads, by-roads, hills, forests, woods and dales of the southern counties of England, and came so to know them by the best of all methods. He walked through them on his feet; and, when so inclined, sat down by the wayside or leaned over a farm or field gate and gazed and mused and day-dreamed. Here is another poem of his:

If I should ever by chance grow rich

I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,

Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,

And let them all to my elder daughter.

The rent I shall ask of her will be only

Each year's first violets, white and lonely,

The first primroses and orchises—

She must find them before I do, that is.

But if she finds a blossom on furze—

Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,

Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,

Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,—

I shall give them all to my elder daughter.

Not, of course, to find a blossom on furze or gorse as soon as any sun is in the year's sky, is the rare feat; and if in your wanderings over the hills and far away you should chance on secret hidden-away Pyrgo or Childerditch, sweet with its fragrance, then enquire for the beautiful, happy young Lady of the Manor. As a matter of fact, the scent of the furze-blossom is not exactly sweet, but nutlike and aromatic. This is what Edward Thomas's friend, W. H. Hudson, the great naturalist, wrote about it: "The gorse is most fragrant at noon, when the sun shines brightest and hottest. At such an hour when I approach a thicket of furze, the wind blowing from it, I am always tempted to cast myself down on the grass to lie for an hour drinking in the odour. The effect is to make me languid; to wish to lie till I sleep and live again in dreams in another world, in a vast open-air cathedral where a great festival of ceremony is perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in scores and hundreds with beautiful bright faces, in flame yellow and orange surplices, are ever and ever coming toward me, swinging their censers until I am ready to swoon in that heavenly incense!" ...

"A Stoat." (stanza 5)

It is the gentle custom of gamekeepers to slaughter at sight (though not for food) the little preying beasts and birds of the woodlands—owls, hawks, crows, jays, stoats, weasels, and such like. They then nail up their carcases to a shed side, or to a barn door, or on a field-gate, leaving them to rot in the wind for a warning to their live mates—just as in the old days the precarious English kings spiked the heads of traitors on the turrets of the Tower. Foxes you "hunt" to death.

[61]. "The Howes of the Silent Vanished Races"

are, I suppose, the mounds, barrows, tumuli or Fairie Hills, some of them round, some of them long, some of them chambered, beneath which the ancient races of Britain, centuries before the coming of the Saxons and the Danes, buried their dead. So once slept the mummied Pharaohs beneath their enormous Pyramids. Age hangs densely over these solitary mounds, as over the Dolmens and Cromlechs—Stonehenge, the Whispering Knights—and the single gigantic Menhirs—the Tingle Stone, the Whittle Stone, the Bair-down-Man and the demoniac Hoar Stone.

These were utterly ancient and unintelligible marvels even when the monk Ranulph Higden wrote his Polychronicon in 1352: The second wonder, he says, is at Stonehenge beside Salisbury. There great stones marvellously huge, be a-reared up on high, as it were gates, so that there seemeth gates to be set up upon other gates. Nevertheless it is not clearly known nor perceived how and to what end they be so a-reared up, and "so wonderlych yhonged." And yet, they are but as falling apple-blossom compared with the age of the world and the antiquity of the Universe:

1st Gravedigger.Come my spade; there is no ancient Gentlemen but Gardiners, Ditchers and Grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.

2nd Gravedigger. Was he a Gentleman?

1st Gravedigger.He was the first that ever bore Armes.

Hamlet.

[62]. The Twa Brothers

—and here is as romantic and tragic a tale of two friends:

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,

They war twa bonnie lasses;

They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,

And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.

They theekit it o'er wi' rashes green,

They theekit it o'er wi' heather;

But the pest cam' frae the burrows-town,

And slew them baith thegither.

They thought to lye in Methven kirkyard,

Amang their noble kin;

But they maun lye in Stronach haugh,

To biek forenent the sin.

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,

They war twa bonnie lasses;

They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,

And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.

Biggit and theekit means builded and thatched; and the twelfth line is "to bask beneath the sun."

[64].

A tragic tale is hidden, rather than told, in this old Scottish ballad. It resembles a half ruinous house in a desolate country, dense green with briar and bramble, echoing with wild voices—its memories gone. Mr. Nahum's picture for it was of a figure in a woman's bright clothes and scarlet hood, but with what looked to me like the head of his own skeleton deep within the hood. And on a stone nearby sat a little winged boy.

[66]. "Her High-born Kinsman."

... And there was a wind in the night as they fared onward, a wind in the mid-air, playing from out the clouds. And presently after, the twain descended into the valley, the one traveller's foot stumbling as he went, against the writhen roots that jutted from between the stones of the path they followed. And it seemed that the voice of one unseen cried, Lo! And the traveller looked up from out of the valley of his journey, and, behold, a wan moon gleamed between the ravelled clouds; and the face of his companion showed for that instant clear against the sky in the shadow of its cloak. And it was the face of a nobleman; renowned for his patience; courteous and cold; whose name is Death....

[68]. "London Bridge."

This is yet another singing-game rhyme. When London was nothing but a cluster of beehive huts in the hill clearings of the great Forest of Middlesex above the marshes and the Thames, there can have been no bridge. There may have been a bridge, it seems, in A.D. 44, eighty-seven years after the death of Caesar; and for centuries there was certainly a ferry, Audery the Shipwight being one of its ferrymen, his oars the shape of shovels, and his boat like a young moon on her back.

The rhyme appears to refer to the wooden bridge built in 994 at Southwark, which was destroyed in 1008 by King Olaf, the Saint of Norway, to whose glory four London churches are dedicated. Olaf had become the ally of Ethelred (the Unready), and to defeat the Danes who had captured the city he first screened his fighting ships with frameworks of osier for the protection of his men, who then rowed them up to the Bridge against the tide. They wapped and bound huge ropes or hawsers round its timber piers, swept down with the slack with the tide, and so brought the Bridge to ruin.

The first stone bridge, in building from 1196 to 1208, was partially destroyed by fire four years afterwards. A picture of the entrancing re-built Bridge of Elizabeth's time, with its chapel, its many-storied gabled houses, its haberdashers', goldsmiths' and booksellers' shops, its cut-waters or starlings and many narrow arches, its gate-house with the spiked heads atop, its drawbridge and pillory, and that strange timber mansion, with not a nail in its wood, called Nonesuch, where perhaps lived the Lord Mayor—all this may be gloated over in any old seventeenth-century map of London. (John Visscher's of 1616 shows a windmill in the Strand!) So narrow were those high arches, and so vehemently flowed the tides beneath them, that even at ebb it was dangerous for a novice to shoot them in a boat. But between Windsor and Gravesend it is said there were forty thousand watermen and wherrymen in Shakespeare's day, yelling "Eastward Ho!", or "Westward Ho!" for passengers. The Bridge was the glory of London; as the Thames it spanned was its main thoroughfare. Fire was its chief enemy; the Great Fire in 1616 and that in 1633, after which it long continued to be used though dark, dismal and dangerous. The present monster of granite, over which the people of London stream to and fro throughout the day, like ants at the flighting, was built thirty yards west of the old one and began to span the river in 1832.

[70]. "This City."

London, thou art of townes A per se[211]

Soveraign of cities, seemliest in sight,

Of high renoun, riches and royaltie;

Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght;

Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;

Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall;

Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght:

London, thou art the flow'r of Cities all.

Strong be thy wallis that about thee standis;

Wise be the people that within thee dwellis;

Fresh is thy ryver with his lusty strandis;

Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis;

Rich be thy merchauntis in substaunce that excellis;

Fair be their wives, right lovesom, white and small;

Clere be thy virgyns, lusty under kellis[212]!

London, thou art the flow'r of Cities all....

William Dunbar

[71]. "He opened House to All." (line 22)

The subject being good victuals, here is the "Bill of Fare at the Christening of Mr. Constable's Child, Rector of Cockley Cley, in Norfolk, January 2, 1682."

"A whole hog's head souc'd with carrots in the mouth, and pendants in the ears, with guilded oranges thick sett.

2 Ox^s cheekes stewed with 6 marrow bones.

A leg of Veal larded with 6 pullets.

A leg of Mutton with 6 rabbits.

A chine of bief, chine of venison, chine of mutton, chine of veal, chine of pork, supported by 4 men.

A Venison Pasty.

A great minced pye, with 12 small ones about it.

A gelt fat turkey with 6 capons.

A bustard with 6 pluver.

A pheasant with 6 woodcock.

A great dish of tarts made all of sweetmeats.

A Westphalia hamm with 6 tongues.

A Jowle of Sturgeon.

A great charg^r of all sorts of sweetmeats with wine, and all sorts of liquors answerable."

And here is another from that inexhaustible Tom Tiddler's ground, Rustic Speech and Folklore for the "funeral meats" of a farmer who died near Whitby in 1760: "Besides what was distributed to 1,000 poor people who had 6d. each in money, there was consumed

• 110 dozen penny loaves,
• 9 large hams,
• 8 legs of veal,
• 20 stone of beef,
• 16 stone of mutton,
• 15 stone of Cheshire cheese, and
• 30 ankers of ale."

For me the "great dish of tarts," the "guilded oranges" and "the great charger of sweetmeats"! But after all, fine fat feasts such as these are but a Town Mouse's crumb of Wedding Cake compared to Mac Conglinnes' Vision in No. 73, which is from the Gaelic of 1100/1200 a.d., as translated by Kuno Meyer. Bragget, line 33, appears to have been a concoction or decoction of ale, honey, sugar and spice, of which last ambrosial ingredients (according to the old rhyme) are made little girls.

[72]. "And bring us in Good Ale"

really good ale, that is, before beer was made "so mortal small," 133 years before tea-leaves came from China (to be boiled and the decoction stored in a barrel); 140 before the first coffee-house in London; and even, one might be tempted to add, before milk came from the cow, for as late as 1512 the two young sons of the fifth earl of Northumberland, Lord Percy aged eleven (who afterwards loved Anne Boleyn), and his younger brother, Maister Thomas Percy, were allowed for "braikfaste" even on "Fysch," or fast Days: "Half a Loif of houshold Brede, a Manchet, a Dysch of Butter, a Pece of Saltfish, a Dysch of Sproits or iii White Herrynge," and a Potell of Bere, i.e. two quarts or Eight mugfuls.

"Hores," or heres, means hairs—cow's or dairymaid's. Butter is less hairy nowadays, though on the other hand we have margarine.

I thought perhaps "Godes good" referred to a "podinge" for Saturdays—a hodge-podge of the scraps and pieces left over through the week; but I find it is really an old phrase for yeast.

[73].

"I' sooth a Feast of Fats" (from the Irish of the twelfth century) like that dream of the rats in the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" as they scuttled to their doom in the cold Weser. For a feast of sweets there is Porphyrio's in the "Eve of St. Agnes:

"And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,

In blanchèd linen, smooth, and lavendered,

While he from forth the closet brought a heap

Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;

With jellies soother than the creamy curd,

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;

Manna and dates, in argosy transferred

From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,

From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

These delicates he heaped with glowing hand

On golden dishes and in baskets bright

Of wreathèd silver: sumptuous they stand

In the retirèd quiet of the night,

Filling the chilly room with perfume light...."

For a banquet of enchantment there is Lamia's, and of magical fruits, poor Laura's in "Goblin Market"; Romeo too went feasting with the Capulets—but only his eyes; so too Macbeth, but his eyes betrayed him. Bottom in his ass's ears asked only for a munch of your good dry oats, a handfull of pease, and a bottle of hay, then fell asleep before even Queen Titania could magick them up for him. As for the poor Babes, blackberries and dewberries were their last supper. These are but a few of scores of banqueting delights in poetry—but to include them all would need such a larder as Jack peeped into when he sat supping in the Giant's kitchen.

[74]. "Pigeon Holes, Stool-ball, Barley-break."

This fragment is a patchwork of the half-forgotten. "Pigeon holes" was a ball-game, played on the green, with wooden arches and little chambers as in a dovecot—a kind of open-air bagatelle. "Stool-ball" was popular with Nancies and Franceses on Shrove Tuesday. Barley-break was in Scotland a kind of "I spy," played in a stackyard, and in England a sort of "French and English," in three marked spaces or compartments, the middle one of which was called hell. And here—while we are on the subject of old and gallant pastimes—is a brief exposition of our noble and National Game of Cricket in its early days. It comes from a book with the queer title, "A Nosegay for the Trouble of Culling; or, Sports of Childhood":

"Cricket is a game universally played in England, not by boys only, for men of all ranks pique themselves on playing it with skill. In Mary-le-bone parish there is a celebrated cricket ground much frequented by noblemen and gentlemen.

The wicket consists of two pieces of wood fixed upright and kept together by another piece which is laid across the top and is called a bail; if either of these pieces of wood be thrown down by the ball the person so hitting them becomes the winner.

The ball used in this game is stuffed exceedingly hard. Many windows and valuable looking-glasses have been broken by playing cricket in a room."

It was in a cricket match in the summer of 1775, when no less than three "balls" had rolled in between a Mr. Small's two stumps without stirring the bail, that it was decided to add stump iii.

As for "tansy" (line 5), here is a recipe for it (to go with the sillabub on p. 506): "Take 15 eggs, and 6 of the whites; beat them very well; then put in some sugar, and a little sack; beat them again, and put about a pint or a little more of cream; then beat them again; then put in the juice of spinage or of primrose leaves to make it green. Then put in some more sugar, if it be not sweet enough; then beat it again a little, and so let it stand till you fry it, when the first course is in. Then fry it with a little sweet butter. It must be stirred and fryed very tender. When it is fryed enough, then put it in a dish, and strew some sugar upon it, and serve it in."

[75]. "Mary's gone a-milking."

And, according to Sir Thomas Overbury (who dipped his pen in nectar as well as ink), "A Fair and Happy Milk-maid," is "a country wench, that is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of hers is able to put all facephysic out of countenance....

"She doth not, with lying long abed, spoil both her complexion and conditions, ... she rises, therefore, with chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. In milking a cow, and straining the teats through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a milk-press makes the milk the whiter or sweeter; for never came almond glove or aromatic ointment on her palm to taint it. The golden ears of corn fall and kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wish to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath is her own which scents all the year long of June, like a new made haycock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity: and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel), she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well.... She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet to say truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones....

"Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the springtime, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."

[76]. "Cypresse black as ere was Crow."

Cypresse (according to a memorandum from one of Mr. Nahum's books) is the fine cobweblike stuff we now call crape. Peaking-stickes, or poking-sticks, were gophering irons for frilling out linen, flounces, etc., etc., and not, as one might guess, curling tongs (since a pointed beard, and the V of hair on the forehead, used to be called peaks). A quoife or coif is a lady's head-dress, such as is still worn by nuns; while as for "maskes for faces," fine ladies in Shakespeare's day customarily wore them (as old pictures show) when they went to see his plays. Masks were useful too in disguising the faces of his players, when—as was the custom in the London theatres up to 1629—boys took women's parts; and in the streets eyes gleamed out of the holes in them, worn then for keeping the skin fair, untanned, and unfreckled, as Julia says of herself in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona:

But since she did neglect her looking-glasse,

And threw her Sun-expelling masque away,

The ayre hath starved the roses in her cheekes,

And pinched the lily-tincture of her face....

[78]. Fairing. (line 5)

In this—the earliest known letter of Shelley's—he too asks for a fairing—the kickshaws and gewgaws sold in the booths of a fair—and a toothsome one; though I haven't yet been able to discover what he meant by "hunting nuts":

(Horsham).

Monday, July 18, 1803.

Dear Kate,

We have proposed a day at the pond next Wednesday; and if you will come to-morrow morning I would be much obliged to you; and if you could any how bring Tom over to stay all night, I would thank you. We are to have a cold dinner over at the pond, and come home to eat a bit of roast chicken and peas at about nine o'clock. Mama depends upon your bringing Tom over to-morrow, and if you don't we shall be very much disappointed.

Tell the bearer not to forget to bring me a fairing—which is some ginger-bread, sweetmeat, hunting-nuts, and a pocket book. Now I end.

I am not,

Your obedient servant,

P. B. Shelley

Even before Mr. Nahum's tower-room, I loved the "bonny brown hair" of this poem. Was it squirrel brown, or chestnut, or hazelnut, or autumn-beech, or heather-brown, or walnut, or old hay colour, or undappled-fawn, or dark lichen, or velvet brown, or marigold or pansy or wallflower-brown—or yet another?—every one of which would look charming beneath the rim of a round blue-ribanded "little straw hat."

[80]. "Widdecombe Fair."

To an eye looking down, the steeple of Widdecombe Church rises in the midst of Dartmoor like a lovely needle of ivory; and hidden beneath the turf around it lie, waiting, the bones of Tom Pearse, Bill Brewer ... Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

[83]. "There were Three Gipsies"

—and they were of England (Somerset), though to judge from this old ballad they may have padded it down from the Highlands:

There cam' Seven Egyptians on a day,

And wow, but they sang bonny!

And they sang sae sweet, and sae very complete,

Down cam' Earl Cassilis' lady.

She cam' tripping adown the stair,

And a' her maids before her;

As soon as they saw her weel-faur'd face

They cast the glamourie owre her;

They gave to her the nutmeg,

And they gave to her the ginger;

And she gave to them a far better thing,

The seven gold rings off her finger.

There was a small black cobbled-up book entitled Glamourie in a red leather case in Thrae, but, alas, it was in a writing I could not easily decipher. On the fly-leaf was scrawled "H.B.", and beneath it was the following:

See, with eyes shut.

Look seldom behind thee.

In secret of selfship

Free thee, not bind thee.

Mark but a flower:

'Tis of Eden. A fly

Shall sound thee a horn

Wooing Paradise nigh.

Think close. Unto love

Give thy heart's steed the rein;

So—course the World over:

Then homeward again.

[84]. "Whatever they find they take it." (line 21)

There was a robber met a robber

On a rig of beans;

Says a robber to a robber,

"Can a robber tell a robber

What a robber means?"

And if not; why not? I had never seen this scrap of jingle until Mr. Ralph Hodgson gave it me. And the following version of an old game rhyme (with its rare "wood") first met my eye by the kindness of another friend, Mrs. Lyon:

"My Mother said that I never should

Play with the gypsies in the wood,

The wood was dark; the grass was green;

In came Sally with a tambourine.

I went to the sea—no ship to get across;

I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse;

I up on his back and was off in a crack,

Sally, tell my Mother I shall never come back."

[86].

This lament for matchless Robin Hood, who should shine in a far better place than between "Beggars" and "Gilderoy," is the only rhyme about him in this collection. The fact is, try as I might, I could not make up my mind which I liked best of his old greenwood ballads in Mr. Nahum's book. The oldest and best were all in formidable spelling, the most of them were long, and maybe I was at last a little lazy. They are all to be found in Professor Child. And if leaving out the merry outlaw will persuade anyone to get and read English and Scottish Ballads, I shall have omitted him to good purpose.

[87]. "Gilderoy."

A pretty song about a monstrously ugly scoundrel, though handsome of feature. Gilderoy was a highwayman, sparing for his prey neither man nor woman, and if there were "roses" on his shoes, they were blood-red. At last fifty armed avengers surrounded his house at night and set on. He killed eight of them before he was captured; which, if true, was bonnie fighting. Nevertheless, such a villain he was that he was hanged, without trial, on a gibbet thirty feet high, and the bones of him (despite the last stanza of the ballad) dangled in chains forty feet above Leith Walk in Edinburgh for fifty years afterwards.

[88]. "And his name was Little Bingo."

In bounding health, it is said, a dog's nose and a woman's elbow are always cold. The reason for which is explained in a legend (referred to in Mrs. Wright's Rustic Speech and Folk Lore). It seems that in the midst of its forty days' riding on the Flood, the Ark one black night sprung a little leak. Father Noah having forgotten to bring his carpenter's bag on board, was at his wits' end to plug the hole in its timbers. In the beam of his rushlight he looked and he looked and he looked; and still the water came rilling in and in. His dog, Shafet, was of course standing by, head on one side, carefully watching his master. And Noah, by good chance, at last casting his eye in his direction, seized the faithful creature and, thrusting his nose into the leak, for a while stopped the flow. But Noah, a merciful man, and partial to animals, quickly perceived that in a few minutes poor Shafet would perish of suffocation, and as, by this time, his wife had descended into the fo'c'sle to see what he was about, he released his dog's nose, and, instead of it, stuffed in her charming elbow. Q.E.D.

But not all dogs are as ready—as Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona knew:

"Launce: 'Nay, 'twill bee this howre ere I have done weeping. All the kinde of the Launces, have this very fault: I have received my proportion, like the prodigious Sonne, and am going with Sir Protheus to the Imperialls Court: I thinke Crab my dog, be the sowrest natured dogge that lives: My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pitty in him then a dogge!"

[90]. "Poor old Horse."

In the furrowed land

The toilsome and patient oxen stand.

Lifting the yoke-encumbered head,

With their dilated nostrils spread,

They silently inhale

The clover-scented gale,

And the vapours that arise

From the well-watered and smoking soil.

For this rest in the furrow after toil

Their large and lustrous eyes

Seem to thank the Lord,

More than man's spoken word.

H. W. Longfellow

[91]. "Ay me, Alas."

Messalina's monkey was, I should fancy, of the kind called a marmoset, "blacke and greene." "Their agilitie and manner of doing is admirable, for that they seeme to have reason and discourse to go upon trees, wherein they seeme to imitate birds." There are so few of these far fair cousins of ours in poetry that I cannot forbear adding a note of Mr. Nahum's from Sir John Maundeville's Travels.

" ... From that City, (that is to say Cassay—the City of Heaven), men go by Water, solacing and disporting themselves, till they come to an Abbey of Monks—that is fast by—that be good religious men after their Faith and Law. In that Abbey is a great Garden and a fair, where be many Trees of diverse manner of Fruits. And in this Garden, is a little Hill, full of delectable Trees. In that Hill and in that Garden be many divers Beasts, as of Apes, Marmosets, Baboons, and many other divers Beasts. And every day, when the Monks of this Abbey have eaten, the Almoner has the remnants carried forth into the Garden, and he smiteth on the Garden Gate with a Clicket of Silver that he holdeth in his hand, and anon all the Beasts of the Hill and of divers places of the Garden, come out, a 3000 or a 4000 of them; they approach as if they were poor men come a-begging; and the Almoner's servants give them the remnants, in fair Vessels of Silver, clean over gilt. And when they have eaten, the Monk smiteth eftsoons on the Garden Gate with the Clicket; and then anon all the Beasts return again to their places that they came from. And they say that these Beasts be Souls of worthy men, that resemble in likeness the Beasts that be fair: and therefore they give them meat for the love of God."

[92]. "O Happy Fly."

And here is another of these creatures—"a sleepy fly that rubs its hands," in Mr. Hardy's words—William Blake's:

Little Fly,

Thy summer's play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath,

And the want

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die.

But the Happy Fly is nowadays gone so dismally out of favour that it would perhaps be prudent to draw attention from him to Lovelace's "Grasshopper":

O thou that swing'st upon the waving hair

Of some well-fillèd oaten beard,

Drunk every night with a delicious tear

Dropt thee from heaven, where thou wert reared!

The joys of earth and air are thine entire,

That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;

And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire

To thy carved acorn-bed to lie.

Up with the day, the Sun thou welcom'st then,

Sport'st in the gilt plaits of his beams,

And all these merry days mak'st merry men,

Thyself, and melancholy streams.

[93]. "Lo, the Bright Air Alive With Dragonflies."

There is an old dialect children's rhyme about these lightlike shimmering stingless insects:

Snakestanger, snakestanger, vlee aal about the brooks;

Sting aal the bad bwoys that vor the fish looks,

Bút let the góod bwoys ketch aál the vish they can,

And car'm away whooam to vry 'em in a pan;

Bread and butter they shall yeat at zupper wi' their vish

While aal the littull bad bwoys shall only lick the dish.

And here is yet another rhyme on the Firefly (from Du Bartas), which I have borrowed (with other passages as curious) from a mine of such things, Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time, by Miss Emma Phipson:

"New-Spain's cucuio, in his forehead brings

Two burning lamps, two underneath his wings:

Whose shining rayes serve oft, in darkest night,

Th' imbroderer's hand in royall works to light:

Th' ingenious turner, with a wakefull eye,

To polish fair his purest ivory:

The usurer to count his glistring treasures:

The learned scribe to limn his golden measures."

"There is a kind of little animal of the size of prawnes," says Champlain of these tiny winged things, "which fly by night, and make such light in the air that one would say that they were so many little candles. If a man had three or four of these little creatures, which are not larger than a filbert, he could read as well at night as with a wax light."

[95]. "The Sale of the Pet Lamb."

"The Pet Lamb" by William Wordsworth is certainly of a more delicate light and colour and music than this poem. But it is much better known. And there is a secret something in the words of Mary Howitt's that wins one at once to love the writer of it.

[98].

This is another translation by Kuno Meyer from the ancient Irish—just the bare bones, that is, of a poem that in its original tongue must have been many times more musical with rhyme and gentle echo and cadence; for the craft of Gaelic verse was an exceedingly delicate one.

I like it for the sake of its cat, its monk, and its age, but chiefly because it reminds me of my own faraway days at Thrae—brooding up there in solitude and silence over Mr. Nahum's books.

As for "white Pangur" and his kind, "it is needlesse," says Topsell, "to spend any time about [Puss's] loving nature to man, how she flattereth by rubbing her skinne against ones legges, how she whurleth with her voyce, having as many tunes as turnes; for she hath one voice to beg and to complain, another to testifie her delight and pleasure, another among her own kind by flattring, by hissing, by spitting, insomuch as some have thought that they have a peculiar intelligible language among themselves." So also John de Trevisa, in 1387: "The catte is a beaste of uncerten heare (hair) and colour; for some catte is white, some rede, some blacke, some skewed (piebald) and speckled in the fete and in the face and in the eares. He is a beste in youth, swyfte, plyaunte, and mery, and lepeth and reseth (rusheth) on all thynge that is tofore him; and is led by a strawe and playeth therwith. He is a right hevy beast in aege, and ful slepy, and lyeth slily in wait for myce. And he maketh a ruthefull noyse and gastfull, whan one proffreth to fyghte with another, and he falleth on his owne fete whan he falleth out of hye places."

The writings of the ancient Egyptians show that, far from detesting to wet his paws, he would then swim in pursuit of fish. They painted a cat for the sound "miaou" in their hieroglyphics; gazed into his changing moon-like eyes and revered him; and embalmed him when dead.

Having borrowed him from Egypt, the Romans brought him to Britain (though we already had a wilding of our own, Felis Catus'), with the ass, the goat, the rabbit, the peacock, not to speak of the cherry, the walnut, the crocus, the tulip, the leek, the cucumber, etc. The Monk's Pangur, then, came of a long lineage.

So valuable were cats in Wales in the eleventh century (two or three hundred years after Pangur), that their price was fixed by law: for a blind kitten a penny; for a kitten with its eyes open, twopence; for a cat of one mouse, fourpence, and so on. And to kill one of the Prince's granary cats meant payment of a fine of as much wheat as would cover up its body when suspended by its tail. In Scotland there has long been a complete Clan of Cats—apart from the witches. As for the Cheshire Cat, he grins, I imagine, not because he has nine lives, is said to be melancholy, may look at a king, and has nothing to do with Catgut, Cat's cradle, and Cat-i'-the-pan, but because he has read in a dictionary that Dick Whittington sailed off to the Isle of Rats, not with a Cat, but with acat or achat, meaning goods for trading—Coals! Long may he grin! How but one country Gib or Tom may befriend the brightfaced Heartsease (so sturdy a little dear that it will bloom at burning noonday in a gravel path) Charles Darwin tells in his "Origin of Species," p. 57.

His "loving nature" to creatures other than man and the heartsease is referred to in the following old Scots nursery rhyme:

There was a wee bit mousikie,

That lived in Gilberaty, O,

It couldna get a bite o' cheese,

For cheetie-poussie-cattie, O.

It said unto the cheesikie,

"Oh fain wad I be at ye, O,

If 't were na for the cruel paws

O' cheetie-poussie-cattie, O."

[99]. "On What Wings Dare He Aspire."

The verb dare (I gather from Webster) was once used only in the past tense, the preterite; for "dare he" therefore in this poem we should now write dared he.

[100].

Andrew Marvell has three rare charms—his poetry is wholly his own; it is as delightful as the sound of his name; and the face in his portrait is as enchanting as either.

[101]-2.

The Phillip of these two poems is, I suppose, the hedge-sparrow or dunnock, that gentle and happy little cousin of the warblers—as light and lovely in voice as they are on the wing. As everyone knows, a bullfinch can be taught to whistle like a baker's boy, and will become so jealous of his mistress that he will hiss and ruff with rage at every stranger. Jackdaws and magpies, too, will become friends to a friend. But a lady whom I have the happiness to know has a nightingale that was hatched in captivity, and so has never shared either the delights or the dangers of the wild. So easy is he in her company that he will perch on her pen-tip as she sits at table, and sing as if out of a garden in Damascus.

[102]. "He Would Chirp."

" ... As she (St. Douceline) sat at meat, if anyone brought her a flower, a bird, a fruit, or any other thing that gave her pleasure, then she fell straightway into an ecstasy, and was caught up to Him Who had made these fair creatures.... One day she heard a lonely sparrow sing, whereupon she said to her companions, 'How lonely is the song of that bird!' and in the twinkling of an eye she was in an ecstasy, drawn up to God by the bird's voice...."

The above is from A Medieval Garner, and this, from a Note to "A Saint's Tragedy," by Margaret L. Woods: When the blessed Elizabeth "had been ill twelve days and more, one of her maids sitting by her bed heard in her throat a very sweet sound, ... and saying, 'Oh, my mistress, how sweetly thou didst sing!' she answered, 'I tell thee, I heard a little bird between me and the wall sing merrily; who with his sweet song so stirred me up that I could not but sing myself.'"

"Loving Redbreasts." (line 31)

My dear, do you know

How a long time ago,

Two poor little children,

Whose names I don't know,

Were stolen away

On a fine summer's day,

And left in a wood,

As I've heard people say.

And when it was night,

So sad was their plight,

The sun it went down,

And the moon gave no light!

They sobbed and they sighed,

And they bitterly cried,

And the poor little things,

They laid down and died.

And when they were dead,

The robins so red

Brought strawberry leaves,

And over them spread;

And all the day long,

They sang them this song,—

Poor babes in the wood!

Poor babes in the wood!

And don't you remember

The babes in the wood?

[105]. "'Tis a Note of Enchantment."

It was a note of enchantment such as this that haunted the memory of Edward Thomas when he was writing his poem called The Unknown Bird. I give only a few lines, but the rest of the beautiful thing may be found in his Poems:

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,

Nor could I ever make another hear.

La-la-la! he called seeming far-off—

As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,

As if the bird or I were in a dream....

... O wild-raving winds! if you ever do roar

By the house and the elms from where I've a-come,

Breathe up at the window, or call at the door,

And tell you've a found me a-thinking of home."

William Barnes

[107]. "Like a Lady Bright."

"They say," says Ophelia, "they say the owle was a Baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your Table." And thus runs the story:

Our Saviour being footsore, weary and hungry one darkening evening, went into a baker's shop and asked for bread. The oven being then hot and all prepared for the baking, the mistress of the shop cut off a good-sized piece of the risen dough to bake for him. At this her fair, greedy daughter, who sate watching what was forward from a little window, upbraided her mother for this wasting of profit on such an outcast; and taking the platter out of her hands, she chopped the piece of dough into half, and half, and half again. Nevertheless when this mean small lump was put into the oven, it presently began miraculously to rise and swell until it exceeded a full quartern of wheaten bread. In alarm at this strange sight the daughter—her round blue eyes largely eyeing the stranger in the dim light—turned on her mother, and cried out: "O Mother, Mother, Heugh, heugh, heugh." "As thou hast spoken," said our Saviour, "so be thou: child of the Night." Whereupon, the poor creature, feathered and in the likeness of an owl, fled forth into the dark towards the woodside.

[109]. "The White Owl."

When night is o'er the wood

And moon-scared watch-dogs howl,

Comes forth in search of food

The snowy mystic owl.

His soft, white, ghostly wings

Beat noiselessly the air

Like some lost soul that hopelessly

Is mute in its despair.

But now his hollow note

Rings cheerless through the glade

And o'er the silent moat

He flits from shade to shade.

He hovers, swoops and glides

O'er meadows, moors and streams;

He seems to be some fantasy—

A ghostly bird of dreams.

Why dost thou haunt the night?

Why dost thou love the moon

When other birds delight

To sing their joy at noon?

Art thou then crazed with love,

Or is't for some fell crime

That thus thou flittest covertly

At this unhallowed time?

F. J. Patmore

[111]. "Her small Soul." (line 23)

Smallest of all shrill souls among the English birds is the wren, but she has a remote relative that dwells in the dark and enormous forests of South America, the Humming Bird, and simply for their own sakes I cannot resist borrowing two more fragments from Miss Phipson's Animal Lore. The first comes out of Purchas's Pilgrimes, and was written by Antonia Galvano of New Spain:

"There be certaine small birds named vicmalim, their bil is small and long. They live of the dew, and the juyce of flowers and roses. Their feathers bee small and of divers colours. They be greatly esteemed to worke gold with. They die or sleepe every yeere in the moneth of October, sitting upon a little bough in a warme and close place: they revive or wake againe in the moneth of April after that the flowers be sprung, and therefore they call them the revived birds—Vicmalim."

The second is Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo's—his very name a string of gems:

" ... I have seene that one of these birds with her nest put into a paire of gold weights [scales] altogether, hath waide no more then a tomini, which are in poise 24 graines, with the feathers, without the which she would have waied somewhat less. And doubtlesse, when I consider the finenesse of the clawes and feete of these birds, I know not whereunto I may better liken them then to the little birds which the lymners of bookes are accustomed to paint on the margent of church bookes, and other bookes of divine service. Their feathers are of manie faire colours, as golden, yellow, and greene, beside other variable colours. Their beake is verie long for the proportion of their bodies, and as fine and subtile as a sowing needle. They are verie hardy, so that when they see a man clime the tree where they have their nests, they fly at his face, and strike him in the eyes, comming, going, and returning with such swiftnesse, that no man should lightly beleeve it that had not seene it...."

[112]. "It caught His Image"

And Shelley:

... I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake

Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined,

I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward

And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries,

With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay

Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky....

Anyone so happy as to be able to remember Mary Coleridge as a friend, will agree that to have seen her eyes is to have seen her own pool and Shelley's lake, imaging such lovely flitting halcyons.

[114]. "King Pandion he is dead."

A wild and dreadful legend is hidden here—of a King who wronged his Queen and her sister, daughters of Pandion, and how they avenged themselves upon him, sacrificing his son to their hatred. That Queen, goes this old tale, became a nightingale, her sister a swallow (crimson still dying the feathers of her throat), the evil king a hoopoe, and the firstborn was raised to life again a pheasant.

[115]. "A Sparhawk Proud"

—a little bird but of a noble family. Listen, at least, to Auceps, the Faulkner or Falconer, in "The Compleat Angler." [I have inserted a few full stops in a sentence that has none] " ... And first, for the Element that I use to trade in, which is the Air, an Element of more worth than weight, an Element that doubtless exceeds both the Earth and Water; for though I sometimes deal in both; yet the Air is most properly mine, I and my Hawks use that most, and it yields us most recreation. It stops not the high soaring of my noble generous Falcon; in it she ascends to such an height, as the dull eyes of beasts and fish are not able to reach to; their bodies are too gross for such high elevations. In the Air my troops of Hawks soar up on high, and when they are lost in the sight of men, then they attend upon and converse with the gods, therefore I think my Eagle is so justly styled, Joves servant in Ordinary. And that very Falcon, that I am now going to see, deserves no meaner a title, for she usually in her flight endangers her self, (like the son of Daedalus), to have her wings scorched by the Suns heat, she flyes so near it. But her mettle makes her careless of danger, for she then heeds nothing, but makes her nimble Pinions cut the fluid air, and so makes her high way over the steepest mountains and deepest rivers, and in her glorious carere looks with contempt upon those high Steeples and magnificent Palaces which we adore and wonder at; from which height I can make her to descend by a word from my mouth (which she both knows and obeys), to accept of meat from my hand, to own me for her Master, to go home with me, and be willing the next day to afford me the like recreation...."

[120]. "Come Wary One."

... Tak any brid,[213] and put it in a cage,

And do al thyn entente and thy corage

To fostre it tendrely with mete and drinke,

Of allè deyntees that thou canst bithinke,

And keep it al-so clenly as thou may;

Al-though his cage of gold be never so gay,

Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold,

Lever in a forest, that is rude and cold,

Gon eté wormés and seich wrecchednesse.

For ever this brid wol doon his bisinesse

To escape out of his cagė, if he may;

His libertee this brid desireth ay....

Geoffrey Chaucer

When I was a child of eight or nine I had a kind of passion for sparrows, and used to set traps for them; but even if I succeeded in taking one alive, which was not always, I could never persuade it to live in a cage above a day or two, however much I pampered it. It drooped and died. Then, like a young crocodile, I occasionally shed tears. One fine morning, I remember, I visited a distant trap and, as usual, all but stopped breathing at discovering that it was "down." Very cautiously edging in my fingers towards the captive, I was startled out of my wits by a sudden prodigious skirring of wings, and lo and behold, I had caught—and lost—a starling. He fled away twenty yards or so, and perched on a hillock. I see him now, his feathers glistening in the sun, and his sharp head turned towards me, his eyes looking back at me, as if foe at foe. And that reminds me of the Griffons—the guardians of the mines of the one-eyed Arimaspians.

" ... From that land go men toward the land of Bacharie, where be full evil folk and full cruel.... In that country be many griffounes, more plentiful than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle, and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth that they be of that shape. But a griffoun hath the body more great, and is more strong, than eight lions, of such lions as be on this side of the world; and larger and stronger than an hundred eagles, such as we have amongst us. For a griffoun there will bear flying to his nest a great horse, if he may find him handy, or two oxen yoked together, as they go at the plough. For he hath his talons so long and so broad and great upon his feet, as though they were homes of great oxen, or of bugles (bullocks), or of kine; so that men make cups of them, to drink out of. And of their ribs, and the quills of their wings, men make bows full strong, to shoot with arrows and bow-bolts...."

But a griffoun is only a gigantic starling, so to speak; and it's a pity mine and I were enemies. "If a sparrow come before my window," wrote John Keats in one of his letters, "I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel." Brick-traps are little help in this.

A Robin Redbreast in a cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage ...

A Skylark wounded in the wing,

A Cherubim does cease to sing ...

The wild Deer wandering here and there

Keeps the Human Soul from care ...

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be beloved by Men ...

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spider's enmity ...

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh ...

The Beggar's Dog and Widow's Cat,

Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat ...

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

... What is heaven? a globe of dew,

Filling in the morning new

Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken

On an unimagined world:

Constellated suns unshaken,

Orbits measureless, are furled

In that frail and fading sphere,

With ten millions gathered there,

To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The men who wrote these words, truly and solemnly meant them. They are not mere pretty flowers of the fancy, but the tough piercing roots of the tree of life that grew within their minds.

[126]. "Come unto these Yellow Sands."

This poem and many others I copied out of Mr. Nahum's book in their original spelling. At first I found the reading of some of them very troublesome. It was like looking at a dried-up flower or beetle. But there the things were; and after a good deal of trouble I not only began to read them more easily, but grew to like them thus for their own sake. First, because this was as they were actually written, before our English printers agreed to spell alike; and next, because the old words with their look of age became a pleasure to me in themselves. It was like watching the dried-up flower or beetle actually and as if by a magic of the mind coming to life. Besides, many of Shakespeare's small poems were already known to me. It touched them with newness to see them (though indeed he never so saw them), as they appeared (seven years after his death), in the pages of the famous folio volume of his Plays that was printed in 1623 by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount.

Not only that; for it is curious too to see how in the old days English was constantly changing—its faded words falling like dead leaves from a tree, and new ones appearing. In a book which William Caxton printed as far back even as 1490, he says: "And certainly our language now used varieth far from that which was used and spoken when I was born. For we Englishmen be born under the domination of the moon, which is never steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season and waneth and decreaseth another season." So in our own day words, like human beings, come into the world and pass away: and many gradually change their meanings.

For if the spelling of a word alters its effect on the eye, it must also affect the mind of the reader; and I must confess that "my lovynge deare," looks to me to tell of somebody more lovable even than "my loving dear." And what about shoogar-plummes, cleere greye eies, the murrkie fogghe, the moones enravysshynge?

And what about—

"Let's goe to Bedde," says Sleepihed;

"Tarrie a while," says Slowe;

"Putte on the Panne," says Greedie Nanne,

"Wee'll suppe afore wee goe."

Not that I have always kept to the old spellings. I have followed my fancy; and if anyone would like to see an old poem in its first looks that is here printed in our own way, all he need do is to go back to the book in which it first appeared.

[128]. "Shee carries Me above the Skie."

... This palace standeth in the air,

By necromancy placèd there,

That it no tempest needs to fear,

Which way soe'er it blow it;

And somewhat southward toward the noon,

Whence lies a way up to the moon,

And thence the Fairy can as soon

Pass to the earth below it.

The walls of spiders' legs are made

Well mortisèd and finely laid;

He was the master of his trade

It curiously that builded:

The windows of the eyes of cats,

And for the roof, instead of slats,

Is covered with the skins of bats,

With moonshine that are gilded....

Michael Drayton

[129]. "Who Calls?"

... Such a soft floating witchery of sound

As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve

Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,

Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,

Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,

Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!...

S. T. Coleridge

[133]. "For Fear of Little Men."

"Terrestrial devils," says Robert Burton, "are those Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows, Trulli, etc., which as they are most conversant with men, so they do them most harm.... These are they that dance on heaths and greens ... and leave that green circle, which we commonly find in plain fields, which others hold to proceed from a meteor falling, or some accidental rankness of the ground, so nature sports herself; they are sometimes seen by old women and children.... Paracelsus reckons up many places in Germany, where they do usually walk in little coats, some two feet long. A bigger kind there is of them called with us hobgoblins, and Robin Goodfellows, that would in those superstitious times grind corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work. They would mend old irons in those Aeolian isles of Lipari, in former ages, and have been often seen and heard.... Dithmarus Bleskenius, in his description of Iceland, reports for a certainty, that almost in every family they have yet some such familiar spirits.... Another sort of these there are, which frequent forlorn houses.... They will make strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains, shave men, open doors and shut them, fling down platters, stools, chests, sometimes appear in the likeness of hares, crows, black dogs, etc." ...

[135].

So too with Hazel Dorn, in the following poem by Mr. Bernard Sleigh, who has most kindly allowed me to print it here for the first time.

They stole her from the well beside the wood.

Ten years ago as village gossips tell;

One Beltane-eve when trees were all a-bud

In copse and fell.

Ominous, vast, the moon rose full and red

Behind dim hills; no leaf stirred in the glen

That breathless eve, when she was pixy-led

Beyond our ken.

For she had worn no rowan in her hair,—

Nor set the cream-bowl by the kitchen door,—

Nor whispered low the pagan faery prayer

Of ancient lore;

But trod that daisied ring in hose and shoon,

To hear entranced, their elf-bells round her ring;

The wizard spells about her wail and croon

With gathering string.

Swiftly her arms they bound in gossamer,

With elvish lures they held her soul in thrall;

With wizard sorceries enveloped her

Past cry or call.

A passing shepherd caught his breath to see

A golden mist of moving wings and lights

Swirl upwards past the red moon eeriely

To starlit heights.

While far off carollings half drowned a cry,

Mournful, remote, of "Mother, Mother dear,"

Floating across the drifting haze,—a sigh

"Farewell, Farewell!"

In the small hours of Beltane or May Day, vast fires have been wont to be kindled on the hills of the Highlands—a custom old as the Druids. Mr. Gilbert Sheldon tells me that as lately as 1899 he saw the hills round Glengariff ablaze with them. They must be set aflame with what is called need-fire. And need-fire is made by nine men twisting a wimble of wood in a balk of oak until the friction makes sparks fly. With these they ignite dry agaric, a fungus that grows on birch-trees, and soon the blaze is reddening the countryside under the night-sky. Need-fire in a window-nook or carried in a lantern is—like iron—an invincible defence against witches and witchcraft. Beltane cakes—to be eaten whilst squatting on the hills, or dancing and watching the fire—are made out of a caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal and milk.

"No Rowan in her Hair."

So potent is the flower or berry or wood of the rowan or witchwood or quicken or whicken-tree or mountain ash against the wiles of the elf-folk, that dairymaids use it for cream-stirrers and cowherds for a switch.

Rowan-tree and red thread

Gar the Witches tyne their speed.

[136]. "True Thomas."

There are four copies in handwriting—two of them written about 1450—of a rhymed romance telling how Thomas in his youth, while dreaming daydreams under the Eildon Tree, was met and greeted by the Queen of fair Elfland. The ballad on p. 127 has been passed on from mouth to mouth.

Up to our own grandmothers' day, at least, this Thomas Rhymour of Ercildoune—a village nor far distant from where the Leader joins the Tweed—was famous as a Wise One and a Seer (a See-er—with the inward eye). He lived seven centuries ago, between 1210 and 1297. Years after he had returned from Elfland—as the ballad tells—while he sat feasting in his Castle, news was brought to him that a hart and a hind, having issued out of the forest, were to be seen stepping fair and softly down the stony street of the town, to the marvel of the people. At this, Thomas at once rose from among his guests; left the table; made down to the street; followed after these strange summoners: and was seen again no more.

"Ilka tett," line 7, means every twist or plait; a "fairlie," stanza II, is a wonder, mystery, marvel; and the "coat" in the last stanza, being of "even cloth," was finer than the finest napless damask.

So, too, Young Tamlane, when a boy "just turned of nine," was carried off by the Elfin Queen:

Ae fatal morning I went out

Dreading nae injury,

And thinking lang, fell soun asleep

Beneath an apple tree.

Then by it came the Elfin Queen

And laid her hand on me;

And from that time since ever I mind

I've been in her companie....

He seems to have been an outlandish and unhuman creature—if this next rhyme tells of him truly (gait, meaning road; pin, (?) knife; coft, bought; moss, peat-bog; and boonmost—you can guess):

Tam o' the linn came up the gait,

Wi' twenty puddings on a plate,

And every pudding had a pin,

"We'll eat them a'," quo' Tam o' the linn.

Tam o' the linn had nae breeks to wear,

He coft him a sheep's-skin to make him a pair,

The fleshy side out, the woolly side in,

"It's fine summer cleeding," quo' Tam o' the linn.

Tam o' the linn he had three bairns,

They fell in the fire, in each others' arms;

"Oh," quo' the boonmost, "I've got a het skin;"

"It's better below," quo' Tam o' the linn.

Tam o' the linn gaed to the moss,

To seek a stable to his horse;

The moss was open, and Tam fell in,

"I've stabled mysel'," quo' Tam o' the linn.

[138]. "Sabrina."

This song is from "Comus," a masque written by Milton for the entertainment of the Earl of Bridgewater, lord lieutenant of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in 1634. That Castle's Hall is now open to the sky—"the lightning shines there; snow burdens the ivy." From a neighbouring room the two princes, Edward V. and his brother, went to their dark death in the Tower. Below the ruinous Castle flow together the Terne and the Corve, on their way to the great Severn—of which Sabrina, the daughter of Estrildis, is the Nymph, she having been drowned in its waters by Guendolen, the jealous queen of Locrine the son of Brut. Estrildis herself, the daughter of King Humber, "so farre excelled in bewtie, that none was then lightly found unto her comparable, for her skin was so whyte that scarcely the fynest kind of Ivorie that might be found, nor the snowe lately fallen downe from the Elament, nor the Lylles did passe the same."

Milton's poems—Lycidas, for instance—frequently resemble bunches of keys, each one of them fitting the lock of some ancient myth or legend. In the lines I have omitted from No. 138 are many such locks awaiting the reader—a reference to the following tale of Glaucus, for example:

There is a secret herb which, if nibbled by fish already gasping to death in our air, gives them the power and cunning to slip back through the grasses into their waters again. Of this herb Glaucus tasted, and instantly his eyes dazzled in desire to share their green transparent deeps. Whereupon the laughing divinities of the rivers gave him sea-green hair, sleeking the stream, fins and a fish's tail, and feasted him merrily. His story is told by Keats in the third book of his Endymion, while Leucothea's, another reference, is to be found in the fifth of the Odyssey. As for the Sirens, here is the counsel Circe gave Ulysses, the while his seamen lay asleep the night after they had returned in safety from Pluto's dismal mansions:

"... And then observe: They sit amidst a mead,

And round about it runs a hedge or wall

Of dead men's bones, their withered skins and all

Hung all along upon it; and these men

Were such as they had fawned into their fen,

And then their skins hung on their hedge of bones.

Sail by them therefore, thy companions

Beforehand causing to stop every ear

With sweet soft wax, so close that none may hear

A note of all their charmings...."

[139].

These Songs are from the last act of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"—the Duke and his guests are retired, and now sleep far from Life's Play; and Puck and the fairies are abroad in his palace.

"I am sent with Broome before."

When the cock begins to crow,

And the embers leave to glow,

And the owl cries, Tu-whit—Tu-whoo,

When crickets do sing

And mice roam about,

And midnight bells ring

To call the devout:

When the lazy lie sleeping

And think it no harm,

Their zeal is so cold

And their beds are so warm.

When the long—long lazy slut

Has not made the parlour clean,

No water on the hearth is put,

But all things in disorder seem;

Then we trip it round the room

And make like bees a drowsy hum.

Be she Betty, Nan, or Sue,

We make her of another hue

And pinch her black and blue.

But when the Puritans came in, it seems, the fairies fled away. And Richard Corbet bewailed their exile:

"Farewell, rewards and fairies!"

Good housewives now may say,

For now foul sluts in dairies

Do fare as well as they.

And though they sweep their hearths no less

Than maids were wont to do,

Yet who of late, for cleanliness,

Finds sixpence in her shoe?...

At morning and at evening both

You merry were and glad;

So little care of sleep or sloth

These pretty ladies had;

When Tom came home from labour,

Or Ciss to milking rose,

Then merrily merrily went their tabour

And nimbly went their toes.

Witness those rings and roundelays

Of theirs, which yet remain,

Were footed in Queen Mary's days

On many a grassy plain;

But since of late, Elizabeth,

And later, James came in,

They never danced on any heath

As when the time hath been.

For times change, and with them changes the direction of man's imagination. He turns his questing thoughts now this way, now that; and though our learned dictionaries may maintain that fairy rings are but brighter circles in green grass formed by "certain fungi, especially marasmius oreades"—who knows?—

He that sees blowing the wild wood tree,

And peewits circling their watery glass,

Dreams about Strangers that yet may be

Dark to our eyes, Alas!

After all, Geoffrey Chaucer, even in his distant day, lamented that England was bereft of the Silent Folk. Whisper, and they will return—bringing with them Prince Oberon, who "is of heyght but of III fote, and crokyd shulderyd.... And yf ye speke to hym, ye are lost for ever."

[140]. "Awm. 'Who feasts tonight?'"

Another mere fragment—from p. 182 of Mr. C. M. Doughty's Play, entitled The Cliffs. For the complete "feast" bestowed on the world by this great traveller and poet, the reader must seek out not only this volume, but his Arabia Deserta, and his Dawn in Britain.

"All in Their Watchet Cloaks." (line 15)

"Nan Page (my daughter) and my little sonne,

And three or foure more of their growth, wee'l dress

Like Urchins, Ouphes, and Fairies, greene and white,

With rounds of waxen Tapers on their heads,

And rattles in their hands ..."

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

[141]. A Hunt's-up

was in old days the Tally-ho blared at daybreak to rouse the chase.

My houndes are bred of Southern kinde,

So flewed, so sanded they;

With crooked knees and dew-laps depe,

With eares the morning dew that sweepe

Slowly they chase their praye;

Their mouths, as tunable as belles

Each under each in concert swells.

The hunte is up, the morne is bright and gray,

Hunting us hence with hunte's up to the day....

Beyond all beastys poor timorous Wat

The hunter's skille doth trye,

See how the houndes, with many a doubte

The cold fault cleanly single out!

Hark to their merrie crie!

They spende their mouthes, echoe replies,

Another chase is in the skies.

The hunte is up, the morne is bright and gray,

Hunting us hence with hunte's up to the day....

These are two of the seven stanzas of a song richly larded with Shakesperean allusions, to be found in The Diary of Master William Silence.

In his book on English Poesy, Puttenham, who was born about 1520, says that a poet of the name of Gray won the esteem of Henry VIII. and the Duke of Somerset for "making certeine merry ballades, whereof one chiefly was, 'the hunte is up, the hunte is up." Henry VIII., moreover, was himself a versifier, and a musician, though, as I have read, a dull one. Here is the first stanza of one of his poems:

As the holly groweth green,

And never changeth hue,

So I am, ever hath been

Unto my lady true....

which, with another equally surprising in sentiment, may be found in full in that casket of antiquities, "Early English Lyrics, chosen by E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick."

[143]. "With his Coat so gray."

Though I be now a grey, grey friar,

Yet I was once a hale young knight,

The cry of my dogs was the only quoir

In which my spirit did take delight.

Thomas Love Peacock

"D'ye ken that a Fox with his last Breath cursed them all as he died in the Morning."

"'Hearken, Reynard, to my words,' (went on the King of Beasts). 'To-day you shall answer with your life for these sins you have committed.' ... 'But nay, my lord,' (sighed the fox), 'I am innocent of all these things. Your Majesty is great and mighty; I meagre and weak. If it is the King's pleasure to kill me, I must die, for whether justly or unjustly, I am your servant; my only strength is in your justice and mercy. To these I appeal, as none has yet appealed in vain. Yea, if it be your Majesty's will that I shall die, then do I accept it humbly. I say no more. But yet I cannot think it a worthy thing for so great a King to wreak his vengeance upon a subject so small.'"

[148]. "A Fulle Fayre Tyme."

What wonder May was welcome in medieval days—after the long winters and the black cold nights when roads were all but impassable, and men, "despisinge schetes" and nightgear, went to their naked beds with nought but the stars or a dip for candle and maybe their own bones and a scatter of straw for warmth. Is not "Loud sing Cuckoo!" our oldest song?

[149]. "Lubber Breeze."

I suppose, is the prevalent wind in Lubberland or Cocaigne, where "the pigs run about ready roasted, and cry, Come eat me!"

And here is a picture of another land of mill, that once long ago sang to its waters, and dreamed above its image in the weir:

Only the sound remains

Of the old mill;

Gone is the wheel;

On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.

Water that toils no more

Dangles white locks

And, falling, mocks

The music of the mill-wheel's busy roar....

Only the idle foam

Of water falling

Changelessly calling,

Where once men had a work-place and a home.

Edward Thomas

[150]. "The Ample Heaven."

The unthrifty sun shot vital gold,

A thousand pieces;

And heaven its azure did unfold

Chequered with snowy fleeces;

The air was all in spice,

And every bush

A garland wore; thus fed my eyes,

But all the earth lay hush.

Only a little fountain lent

Some use for ears,

And on the dumb shades language spent—

The music of her tears.

Henry Vaughan

"The Time sa Tranquil is and Still." (line 13)

Clear had the day been from the dawn,

All chequered was the sky,

Thin clouds, like scarves of cobweb lawn,

Veiled heaven's most glorious eye.

The wind had no more strength than this,

—That leisurely it blew—

To make one leaf the next to kiss

That closely by it grew.

The rills, that on the pebbles played,

Might now be heard at will;

This world the only music made,

Else everything was still....

Michael Drayton

[153]. "O for a Booke."

Nor—says John Bunyan:

Nor let them fall under Discouragement

Who at their Horn-book stick, and time hath spent

Upon (their) A, B, C while others do

Into their Primer, or their Psalter go.

Some boys with difficulty do begin

Who in the end, the Bays, and Lawrel win.

On the other hand;

Some Boys have Wit enough to sport and play,

Who at their Books are Block-heads day by day.

Some men are arch enough at any Vice,

But Dunces in the way to Paradice.

So much for the reader, but the writer, too, may fall under discouragement. Listen to Colum Cille, an Irish scribe of the eleventh century, in yet another translation from the Gaelic:

My hand is weary with writing,

My sharp quill is not steady,

My slender-beaked pen pours forth

A black draught of shining dark-blue ink.

A stream of the wisdom of blessed God

Springs from my fair-brown shapely hand;

On the page it squirts its draught

Of ink of the green-skinned holly.

My little dripping pen travels

Across the plain of shining books,

Without ceasing for the wealth of the great—

Whence my hand is weary with writing.

But to come back to the reader in his shadie nooke:

Tales of my Nursery! shall that still loved spot,

That window corner, ever be forgot,

Where through the woodbine—when with upward ray

Gleamed the last shadow of departing day—

Still did I sit, and with unwearied eye,

Read while I wept, and scarcely paused to sigh!

In that gay drawer, with fairy fictions stored,

When some new tale was added to my hoard,

While o'er each page my eager glance was flung,

'Twas but to learn what female fate was sung;

If no sad maid the castle shut from light,

I heeded not the giant and the knight.

Sweet Cinderella, even before the ball,

How did I love thee—ashes, rags, and all!

What bliss I deemed it to have stood beside,

On every virgin when thy shoe was tried!

How longed to see thy shape the slipper suit!

But, dearer than the slipper, loved the foot.

As for "the streete cryes all about": according to London Lickpenny, among the street-cries in the fifteenth century were: Hot Pease! Hot Fine Oatcakes! Whitings maids, Whitings! Have you any old boots? Buy a mat! New Brooms, green brooms! with a general hullabaloo of What d'ye lack? and now and again a bawling of Clubs! to summon the tag, rag, and bobtail to a row.

Of singing cries, we may still hear in the sunny summer London streets such sweet and doleful strains as Won't you buy my sweet blooming lavender: Sixteen branches a penny! and in the dusks of November the muffin-man's bell. Besides these, we have Rag-a'-bone! Milk-o! Any scissors to grind? Clo' props! Water-creeses! and, as I remember years ago,

Young lambs to sell, white lambs to sell;

If I'd as much money as I could tell

I wouldn't be crying, Young lambs to sell!

[155]. "With Hey! with How! with Hoy."

In Rustic Speech and Folk Lore Mrs. Wright gives the decoys with which the country people all over England beguile their beasts and poultry into "shippon, sty, or pen"; or holla them on their way, but much, I have found, depends on him who hollas!

For Cows: Coop! Cush, cush!—while the milkmaid calls—Hoaf! Hobe! Mull! Proo! Proochy! Prut!

For Calves: Moddie! Mog, mog, mog! Pui-ho! Sook, sook!

For Sheep: Co-hobe! Ovey!

For Pigs: Check-check! Cheat! Dack, dack! Giss! or Gissy! Lix! Ric-sic! Shug, shug, shug! Tantassa, tantassa pig, tow a row, a row! Tig, tig, tig!

For Turkeys: Cobbler! Peet, peet, peet! Pen! Pur, pur, pur!

For Geese: Fly-laig! Gag, gag, gag! Ob-ee! White-hoddy!

For Ducks: Bid, bid, bid! Diddle! Dill, dill! Wid! Wheetie!

For Pigeons: Pees! Pod!

And for Rabbits: Map!

"Yea, and I do vow unto thee," said the voice of the beautiful virgin speaking out of the rock; "Call unto them but in their own names and language, and the strong and delicate creatures of the countries of the mind will flock into the living field of thy vision, and above the waters will befall the secret singing of birds, and thou shalt be a pilgrim. Mark how intense a shadow dwells upon this stone! Therein too lurk marvels to be seen." The voice ceased, and I heard nothing but the tapping of a fragment of dry lichen which in the draught of the hot air caused by the burning sunlight stirred between rock and sand. And I cried, "O unfortunate one, I thirst!"

[156]. "Lavender's blue."

"A poor thing," as Audrey says, but homely and melodious and once somebody's own: such a somebody as inscribed on the walls of Burford Church:

"... Love made me Poet

And this I writt,

My harte did do yt

And not my witt."

[159]. "There is a Garden in her Face."

Thomas Campion was "borne upon Ash Weddensday being the twelft day of February. An. Rg. Eliz. nono"—1567. He had one sister, Rose. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and this was his yearly allowance of clothes: A gowne, a cap, a hat, ii dubletes, ii payres of hose, iiii payres of netherstockes, vi payre of shoes, ii shirts, and two bandes. He was allowed also one quire of paper every quarter; and half a pound of candles every fortnight from Michaelmas to Lady Day. He studied law, may for a time have fought as a soldier in France, and became a physician. He died on March 1, 1620, and was buried on the same day at St. Dunstan's in the West, Fleet Street, the entry in the register under that date being: "Thomas Campion, doctor of Phisicke, was buried."

I have taken these particulars from Mr. S. P. Vivian's edition of his poems, because it is pleasant to share even this little of what is known of a man who is not only a rare and true poet—though for two centuries a forgotten one—but also because he was one of the chief song-writers in the great age of English Music. Like all good craftsmen, he did his work "well, surely, cleanly, workmanly, substantially, curiously, and sufficiently," as did the glaziers of King's College Chapel, which is distant but a kingfisher's flight over a strip of lovely water from his own serene Peterhouse. It seems a little curious that being himself a lover of music he should have at first disliked rhymes in verse, though he lived to write such delicate rhymed poems as this.

In the preface to his Book of Ayres, he tells the secret of his craft: "In these English Ayres," he says, "I have chiefely aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be much for him to doe that hath not power over both."

[160]. "What is there hid in the Heart of a Rose?"

There is a legend in Sir John Mandeville's Travels, which in our spelling runs thus: "Bethlehem is a little city, long and narrow and well walled, and on each side enclosed with good ditches. It was wont to be called Ephrata.... And toward the east end of the city is a full fair church and a gracious, and it hath many towers, pinnacles, and corners, full strong, and curiously made; and within that church be forty-four pillars of marble, massive and fair.

"And between the city and the church is the field Floridus, that is to say, the 'Field of Flowers'; it being so named for this reason: A fair maiden was blamed with wrong and slandered ... for which cause she was demned to death and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was led. And, as the fire began to crackle about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,—that, as assuredly as she was not guilty of that sin, He would help her and make it to be known to all men, of His merciful grace. And when she had thus said, she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire quenched and out; and the brands that were burning became red rose-trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white rose-trees, full of roses. And these were the first rose-trees and roses, both white and red, that ever any man saw; and thus was this maiden saved by the grace of God. And therefore is that field clept the field of God, Floridus, for it is full of roses."

[163]. "These Flowers, as in their causes, sleep." (line 4)

—while, also, flowers may themselves be the causes of poems, as, in a degree, a dewdrop in a buttercup is of the buttercup's causing. There the rhodora, or rhododendron:

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! Let the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky ...

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew;

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you....

R. W. Emerson

And here anemone and cyclamen—in an enchanting little poem of but the day before yesterday:

Long ago I went to Rome

As pilgrims go in Spring,

Journeying through the happy hills

Where nightingales sing,

And where the blue anemones

Drift among the pines

Until the woods creep down into

A wilderness of vines.

Now every year I go to Rome

As lovers go in dreams,

To pick the fragrant cyclamen

To bathe in Sabine streams,

And come at nightfall to the city

Across the shadowy plain,

And hear through all the dusty streets

The waterfalls again.

Margaret Cecilia Furse

"The Phoenix builds her Spicy Nest." (line 18)

The Phoenix, in faith rather than by sight, is thus described by Pliny: "She is as big as an eagle, in colour yellow, and bright as gold, namely all about the neck, the rest of the bodie a deepe red purple; the taile azure blue, intermingled with feathers among of rose carnation colour: and the head bravely adorned with a crest and pennache finely wrought, having a tuft and plume thereupon right faire and goodly to be seene."

Her life is but three hundred and nine years less in duration than that of the many-centuried patriarch Methuselah. When the lassitude of age begins to creep upon her, she wings across sea and land to the sole Arabian Tree. There she builds a nest of aromatic twigs, cassia and frankincense, and enkindling it with her own dying ardour she is consumed to ashes. And yet—while still they are of a heat beyond the tempering of the sun that shines down on them from the heavens, they magically stir, take body and awaken; and she rearises to life renewed, in her gold, her rose carnation, her purple and azure blue.

[164]. "The Bower of Bliss."

This and No. 348 are but the merest fragments of the Faerie Queene; but they show of what an echoing mutable music are its words. And were ever light and colour so living, natural and crystal clear? Reading this verse, hearing its sounds and seeing its sights in the imagination, you cannot think Thomas Nash was too fantastical when he wrote: "Poetry is the Honey of all Flowers, the Quintessence of all Sciences, the Marrow of Art and the very Phrase of Angels." Indeed, as Spenser's epitaph in Westminster Abbey says of him, he was the Prince of Poets of his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him. And poet of poets he has always remained. John Keats, when he was a boy, used to sit in a little summerhouse at Enfield with his schoolfellow Cowden Clarke, simply drinking in this verse, and laying up store of purest English for his own brief life's matchless work. So, too, Abraham Cowley:

"How this love (for poetry) came to be produced in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old...."

[170].

The poems of Robert Herrick and of Thomas Campion though known well in their own day remained for many years practically unread and forgotten. Thomas Traherne's (who died in 1674) had an even more curious fate, for they were discovered in manuscript and by chance on a bookstall so lately as 1896, and were first taken to be the work of Henry Vaughan. Here is a passage in prose from Centuries of Meditation, by the same writer, repeating this reverie of his childhood in other words: "The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! oh, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels! and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels: I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire...."

[172]. "But silly we." (line 9)

This poem, I think carries with it the thought that in study of that great book, that fair volume, called the World, there is no full stop, no limit, pause, conclusion. Like bees, with their nectar and honeycomb, man stores up his knowledge and experience in books. These and his houses outlast him; the things he makes; and here and there a famous or happy or tragic name is for a while remembered. Else, we have our Spring and Summer—and dark cold skies enough, many of us—then vanish away, seeming but restless phantoms in Time's enormous dream. So far at least as this world is concerned. And generations of men—as of the grasses and flowers—follow one upon the other.

Oh, yes, my dear, you have a Mother,

And she, when young, was loved by another,

And in that mother's nursery

Played her mamma, like you and me.

When that mamma was tiny as you

She had a happy mother too:

On, on ... Yes, presto! Puff! Pee-fee!—

And Grandam Eve and the apple-tree.

O, into distance, smalling, dimming,

Think of that endless row of women,

Like beads, like posts, like lamps, they seem—

Grey-green willows, and life a stream—

Laughing and sighing and lovely; and, Oh,

You to be next in that long row!

And yet, "But silly we" is true of most of us and of most of our time on earth. As Coventry Patmore says:

An idle Poet, here and there,

Looks round him, but, for all the rest,

The world, unfathomably fair,

Is duller than a witling's jest.

Love wakes men, once a life-time each;

They lift their heavy lids, and look;

And, lo, what one sweet page can teach

They read with joy, then shut the book:

And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,

And most forget; but, either way,

That and the Child's unheeded dream

Is all the light of all their day.

Or again, in the words of Sir John Davies—long since dead:

... I know my Soul hath power to know all things,

Yet is she blind and ignorant in all:

I know I am one of Nature's little kings,

Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life's a pain and but a span,

I know my sense is mocked with everything;

And, to conclude, I know myself a man

Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

[175]. "For Soldiers"

from an old book entitled, "A Posie of Gilloflowers, eche differing from other in Colour and Odour, yet all sweete." There were pretty and sonorous names for collections of poems in the days of Humfrey Gifford (of whom nothing is known but that he made this Posie)—such as Wits Commonwealth; The Banket of Sapience; The Paradise of Dainty Devices; A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions; and A Handfull of Pleasant Delights.

"Ye Buds of Brutus Land"

sons of those, that is, who, according to the ancient myth were descended from Brut or Brute, the Trojan, the conqueror of Albion and its giants, the founder of London, after whom the land is named Britain.

"Soldiers are Prest" (stanza I)

that is, seized by the King's men, the press-gangs, and carried away by force to fight in the wars.

"Your Queen."

"To the Most High, Mightie and Magnificent Empresse Renowmed for Pietie, Vertue, and all Gratious Government Elizabeth by the Grace of God Queene of England Fraunce and Ireland and of Virginia." So runs Spenser's dedication of "The Faerie Queene," while in "The Shepheardes Calender" for April, are the lines:

See, where she sits upon the grassie greene,

(O seemely sight)

Yclad in Scarlot like a mayden Queene,

And Ermines white.

Upon her head a Cremosin coronet,

With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set:

Bayleaves betweene,

And Primroses greene

Embellish the sweete Violet.

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Oberon tells Puck how he saw that "Faire Vestall" in danger of Love's sharp arrows—and "The Imperiall Votresse passèd on In maiden meditation, fancy free." But Shakespeare, if actually invited to Court, it is said, "was in paine."

[176]. "The Battle-Hymn."

The writer of this magnificent Battle-Hymn died in 1910, at the age of ninety-one. If Henry Carey, who wrote our own "National Anthem," had realised how much and how often his fellow countrymen were to be fated to use his words, he would perhaps have taken a little more trouble with them (as much, at any rate, as Shelley and Flecker took in their versions of it), and would have found a pleasanter rhyme than "over us" for "glorious," and than "voice" for "cause." If, on the other hand, he had read the following Grace which Ben Jonson made at the moment's call before King James, he might perhaps have refrained from rhyming altogether, and so, by sheer modesty, would have missed being immortalized:

Our King and Queen the Lord God Blesse,

The Paltzgrave, and the Lady Besse.

And God blesse every living thing

That lives, and breathes, and loves the King.

God bless the Counsell of Estate,

And Buckingham the fortunate.

God blesse them all, and keep them safe,

And God blesse me, and God blesse Raph.

"The king," says John Aubrey, "was mighty enquisitive to know who this Raph was. Ben told him 'twas the drawer at the Swanne taverne, by Charing-crosse, who drew him good Canarie. For this drollery his majestie gave Ben an hundred poundes....

[177].

"To those," it is said, "who have resided a long time by the falls of Niagara, the lowest whisper is distinctly audible." Their hearing accustoms itself to that unending and enormous roar, and becomes more exquisite. This is untrue of those whose finer sense is lulled by the roar of war: they become deafened, and cannot hear the voice of the one soldier—of which human "ones" every army is composed. And so war may poison even when its intention and its cause are honour and faith. In this particular poem (No. 177), the soldier is one of those who fought in the Transvaal in the years 1899-1901.

[180].

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer—these are the names of but a few of the men, none of them old, many of them in the heyday of their gifts and genius, who besides proving themselves soldiers in the Great War had also proved themselves poets. Within his powers, every true poet lives in his country's service. These in that service died.

" ... Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of which are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. The place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. But something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, and hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon of outer night thudding on the earth—the incessant guns of the great war.

And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child, who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable, the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I used to know in the morning."

H. M. Tomlinson

[184].

The reader may speculate how it is that while room has been found here for this entrancing rhyme, none has been made for Macaulay's longer Lays, Browning's Cavalier Songs, and a host of poems equally gallant and spirited. Perhaps he will forgive their absence if he will consider what is said on page xxxiii, and if he will also remember that every chooser must make his choice.

There is, too, the story of the Woodcutter's son. This fuzzheaded boy, called Dick or Dickon, while playing on his elder pipe the tune of "Over the Hills" one dappled sunshine morning in the woods, fortuning to squinny his eye sidelong over his pipe, perceived a crooked and dwarf old man to be standing beside him where before was only a solitary bearded thistle. This old man, the twist of whose countenance showed him to be one with an ear for woodland music, invited the Woodcutter's son to descend with him into the orchards of the Gnomes—and to help himself. This he did, and marvellously he fared. On turning out his pockets that night—the next day being a Sunday—his Mother found (apart from the wondrous smouldering heap of fruits, amethyst, emerald, rubies and the topaz, which he had given her) two or three strange unpolished stones, and these also from the Old Man's orchards. And she climbed up with her candle, he being abed, and asked him why he had burdened himself with such things of little seeming value, when he might have carried off their weight in diamonds big as dumplings. "Well, you see, mother dear," he drowsily replied, "I chose of the best and brightest till my eyes dazzled; and then there was a bird that called, Dick! Dick! Dick! Dick! and those magic pebbles were among her eggs."

[185]. "We be the King's Men."

The Song of Soldiers from Act I., Scene I., Part i. of that mighty play, The Dynasts. "The time is a fine day in March, 1805. A highway crosses the ridge, which is near the sea, and the south coast is seen bounding the landscape below, the open Channel extending beyond."

[186]. Budmouth Dears

—from The Dynasts, Act II., Scene I., Part iii.—the song sung in Camp on the Plain of Vittoria by Sergeant Young (of Sturminster Newton) of the Fifteenth (King's) Hussars on the eve of the longest day in the year 1813 and of Wellington's victory.

[187]. "Trafalgar"

—from The Dynasts, Act V., Scene VII., Part i. Boatmen and burghers with their pipes and mugs are sitting on settles round the fire in the taproom of the Old Rooms Inn at Weymouth. The body of Nelson on board his battered Victory has lately been brought to England to be sepulchred in St. Paul's. And this is the Song the Second Boatman sings.

The "Nothe," line 8, is the promontory that divides for Weymouth, where lived Nelson's Captain Hardy, its harbour or back-sea on the north, and the Portland Roads, its front-sea on the south "Roads," meaning protected seas where ships may ride at anchor. On this tempestuous and fateful night, October 21, 1805, the breakers were sweeping clean across the spit of land called the Narrows. On the further side runs for a round ten miles that enormous wall of pebbles—Chesil Beach, whose stones the tides sort out so precisely—the least in size towards Lyme Regis—that a coast-man can tell even in a thick mist where he has landed on the beach, merely by measuring them with his eye. About ten miles up this water swim in Spring the swans of the Swannery of Abbotsbury with their cygnets, each mother-bird striving to decoy as many strange young ones into her train as she can. So deals a proud and powerful nation with the lesser kingdoms of the earth.

About four years and a half before Trafalgar, on April 2nd, 1801, Nelson and Parker had won the Battle of the Baltic—as Thomas Campbell (who was then twenty-four), in his well-known poem tells:

... Like leviathans afloat

Lay their bulwarks on the brine;

While the sign of battle flew

On the lofty British line:

It was ten of April morn by the chime:

As they drifted on their path,

There was silence deep as death;

And the boldest held his breath,

For a time....

So accustomed, indeed, are we mere landsmen to the exploits of the Navy on the High Seas that we easily forget it was once to our forefathers a novelty and a wonder—such a wonder as might be compared with the fabulous Castles in Spain or the Gardens of Babylon, as the old nameless poet of the following lines recounts:

Cease now the talke of wonders! nothing rare

Of floateing ilandes, castles in the aire!

Of wooden walls, graves walkeing, flieing steedes,

Or Trojan horse! The present truth exceeds

Those ancient fables; floating iles great store,

Sent from the British Ile, now guard her shore,

And castles strong without foundation stande

More safe on waters pavement then on lande....

[189]. "Brave Sailors."

And here is one of them—come home to his sweetheart, and she (until stanza 6) not recognizing him:

As I walked out one night, it being dark all over,

The moon did show no light I could discover,

Down by a river side where ships were sailing,

A lonely maid I spied, weeping and bewailing.

I boldly stept up to her, and asked her what grieved her,

She made me this reply, "None could relieve her,

For my love is pressed, she cried, to cross the ocean,

My mind is like the Sea, always in motion."

He said, "My pretty fair maid, mark well my story,

For your true love and I fought for England's glory,

By one unlucky shot we both got parted,

And by the wounds he got, I'm broken hearted.

"He told me before he died his heart was broken,

He gave me this gold ring, take it for a token,—

'Take this unto my dear, there is no fairer,

Tell her to be kind and love the bearer.'"

Soon as these words he spoke she ran distracted,

Not knowing what she did, nor how she acted,

She run ashore, her hair showing her anger,

"Young man, you've come too late, for I'll wed no stranger."

Soon as these words she spoke, her love grew stronger.

He flew into her arms, he could wait no longer,

They both sat down and sung, but she sung clearest,

Like a Nightingale in spring, "Welcome home, my dearest."

He sang, "God bless the wind that blew him over."

She sang, "God bless the ship that brought him over,"

They both sat down and sung, but she sung clearest,

Like a Nightingale in spring, "Welcome home, my dearest."

To get any rhythm into this doggerel is like persuading a donkey to gallop. And yet how clearly one sees the dark night, the disguised sailor and his sweetheart talking together on the river strand, and the ships on its bosom in the gloom; while the wistful, deceitful tale he tells her is as old as Romance. Once get cantering, too; how pleasing is the motion!

[192]. "Dark Rosaleen."

From his childhood, which was spent in a little shop in Dublin, Mangan had a dark and troubled life. But always a passionate love for his country, Ireland—his Dark Rosaleen—burned on in his imagination as it is revealed in the wild and haunting music of this poem.

[197].

There are so many words in this poem strange to an English ear that it seems better to explain them here so as not to interrupt the actual reading of it too much. After all, the little that is not plain speaks in its music, and that is a very large part of what we call its "meaning." For the meaning of a poem is all the interest, thought, pictures, music, and happiness that we can get out of it—it is all that it does to us.

Stanza (1) "loaning" is a green path in the fields, and "ilka" means every; "wede" means faded or vanished. (2) "bught" is a sheepfold; "scorning" I suppose means cracking jokes at one another; "dowie" means sad and drooping; "daffing" and "gabbing" is larking and gossiping; a "leglin" is a milkpail. (3) "hairst" means harvest; "bandsters, "sheaf-binders"; "lyart" is faded with age; "runkled" wrinkled; "fleeching" is wheedling or coaxing or flirting. (4) "swankies" means the blithe lads of stanza 2; "bogle" means goblin or bogey—an evening game like "I spy," I should think. (5) "Dool and wae" means sorrow or grief and woe.

[199].

Robert Hayman, a Merchant of Bristol at the age of twenty-five, was a nephew of Sir Walter Raleigh's. He became Governor of a Plantation called The British Hope in Newfoundland. In 1628 he settled in Guiana (of whose gilded and barbaric Amazonian princesses his uncle tells in Hakluyt's Voyages). He made his will in 1633, and nothing more was afterwards heard of him—at least by the people of Bristol.

Poetry shines out of his stumbling verses like the setting sun through a thicket of thorns. Their "Totnes" is an uncommonly old town, mainly consisting of that "long street" where, when a boy, he met "godly Drake." At its East-Gate is the Brutus-stone—for here Brut of Troy is said first to have trodden English soil, having landed from the Dart. Twenty miles distant to westward of the town lies on its rivers Plymouth—the Spaniards' wasps' nest—its Drake in stone now gazing out to sea from its Hoe. Twenty miles to the east on the coast is Hayes Barton, where Raleigh was born about 1552. And seven miles down the Dart is the village of Greenway, the home of his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the discoverer of Newfoundland, who was in that year a boy of about sixteen. Here amid-stream juts up the Anchor Rock upon which, runs the story, the discoverer of tobacco and of the potato used to sit and smoke his pipe. In 1587 Gilbert and Raleigh sailed together in search of the as yet Unfoundland, but on that voyage in vain.

[200]. "For Hally Now is Dead."

Hally was Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of James I., Queen Elizabeth's godson, and a beloved patron of the arts and poetry to whom Sir Walter Raleigh looked for happy favours. He was little of body and quick of spirit, and, like Alexander, delighted "to witch the World with noble horsemanship." He died when he was nineteen. In Windsor Castle may be seen a suit of armour made for this young prince when he was a boy—a suit which for grace and craftsmanship is said to be one of the most beautiful things of its kind in the world.

[202]. "Henry Before Agincourt."

Here, again, the verse of this ancient fragment jolts, jars, and moves cumbrously as a cannon over rocky ground. But how wide and moving a picture it presents, and how noble is its utterance.

[203]. "Alexander the Great."

This is the translation of another ancient Irish poem made by Kuno Meyer. Plutarch wrote Alexander's Life (comparing him with Julius Caesar), in which the young prince is pictured as if by Velasquez. Here are a few words from the translation of this life which Sir Thomas North made from the French of Amiot:

"The ambition and desire he (Alexander) had of honour showed a certain greatness of mind and noble courage, passing his years.... For when he was asked one day (because he was swift of foot) whether he would assay to run for victory at the Olympian Games, 'I could be content' (said he), 'so I might run with Kings'." When, too, "they brought him news that his Father had taken some famous city, or had won some great battle, he was nothing glad to hear it, but would say to his playfellows: 'Sirs, my Father will have all: I shall have nothing left me to conquer with you that shall be ought worth' ..."

"Is it even so?" said my lady.

"Even so!" said my lord.

[205]. "And the Kings Asleep."

... Not a stone-cast from the summit of the hill where all snow was now parched and evaporated away, stood a cairn of boulders and thereon sate three Eagles whose eyes surveyed the kingdoms of the world, its seas and Man's lost possessions. And the Eagle that was eastwards of the three, a little rimpled her wings and cried: "Where now? where now?" And the Eagle that shook upon her plumes the dazzle of the dying sun stretched out her corded neck and yelped: "Man! Man!" And the midmost Eagle stooped low its golden head and champed between its talons with its beak upon the boulder: "The Earth founders," she mewed. And a stillness was upon the hill as though of a myriad watching eyes.

[207]. "Dance Sedately"

—and here are two old rhymes for the dancing to. One for a Morris Dance:

Skip it and trip it nimbly, nimbly,

Tickle it, tickle it lustily;

Strike up the tabour for the wenches' favour,

Tickle it, tickle it lustily.

Let us be seene in Hygate Freene,

To dance for the honour of Holloway.

Since we are come hither, let us spare for no leather

To dance for the honour of Holloway.

And this for a Flower Dance:

Where's my lovely parsley, say?

My violets, roses, where are they?

My parsley, roses, violets fair,

Where are my flowers? Tell me where?

And yet another for one's Lonesome Low:

The king's young dochter was sitting in her window,

Sewing at her silken seam;

She lookt out o' the bow-window,

And she saw the leaves growing green,

My luve;

And she saw the leaves growing green.

She stuck her needle into her sleeve,

Her seam down by her tae,

And she is awa' to the merrie greenwood,

To pu' the nit and the slae,

My luve;

To pu' the nit and the slae.

The "dochter" is of course daughter, "nit" is nut, and "slae" sloe.

[209].

Pause an instant on the fifth word in the third stanza and you can actually hear the birds laughing—yaffle, blackcap, bullfinch and jay, and the droning and the whistling and the whir-r-r.

[210]. Fa la La.

Scattered through this volume are many songs, a few of them—both words and music—exceedingly ancient. Mr. Nahum had a cofferful of old hand-written music (square crotchets and quavers and handsome clefs); and many outlandish instruments were hung up in the dust and silence in one of his cupboards. I remember some small living thing set a string jangling when for the first time the door admitted me to a sight of their queer shapes and appearances. In an old book of 1548, The Complaynt of Scotland, there is a list of names, not only of old folk-tales such as "The tayl of the wolfe of the varldes end"; and "The tayl of the giantes that eit quyk men," but of songs and dances for long in common love and knowledge even in those old times. Here are a few of the songs:

God You, Good Day, Wild Boy.

Broom, Broom on Hill.

Trolly lolly leman, dow.

All musing of Marvels, amiss have I gone.

O Mine Heart, hey, this is my Song.

Shall I go with You to Rumbelow Fair?

That Day, that Day, that Gentle Day.

Alas, that Samyn Sweet Face!

In are Mirthful Morrow.

And here some Dances:

• All Christian Men's Dance.
• Long Flat Foot of Garioch.
• The Lamb's Wind.
• Leaves Green.
• The Bace of Voragon.
• The Loch of Slene.
• The Bee.
• Shake a Trot, and
• The Vod and the Val.

The tunes to these were played at that day on four kinds of bagpipe (including a drone bagpipe), a trump, a recorder, a "fiddell," and a "quhissil"—which is the pleasantest way of spelling whistle I have yet seen. The melodies and words of most of them are, apparently, all now clean forgotten.

"Fa la la" (No. 210) is of a different kind, being one of hundreds of madrigals, "ayres" and ballets of which both the words and the music were written in England in the first twenty years or so of the seventeenth century. There is, of course, a hoard of learning that one may study on this English music—William Byrd's, John Dowland's, Thomas Ford's, Thomas Campion's, John Bartlet's, Philip Rosseter's, Robert Ayres' and others—which in its own day was as famous in the countries of Europe as English poetry is now. It was the coming of foreign music and musicians to England—the Italians and Handel and Mendelssohn—that put it ungratefully out of mind. To-day its dust has at last been brushed away. The Madrigals are being printed and sung again, and Dr. Fellowes has lately published a volume containing the words of hundreds of such lively, nimble and heart-entrancing rhymes—intended by their writers to carry with them a double charm—not only their own verbal melody, grace and beauty, but also their music's.

My own knowledge is scanty indeed, but I gather that a madrigal is intended to be sung, unaccompanied with instruments, by voices only—three to five, six, or seven, it may be, and men's and women's or boys', coursing, echoing, interweaving, responding and rilling together like the countless runnels and wavelets of a brook over its stones, or a wood full of singing birds at evening. An Ayre is different. It is for the voice—singing its melody to the accompaniment of lute, viol or virginal, as a nightingale may sing at dusk above the murmur of a softly-brawling brook. A Ballet, the most ancient of all three, went hand in hand and foot to foot with a dance.

All I wish to make clear is that the printed words of Nos. 210 and 212, for instance, can give only a fraction of the pleasure their poets intended, who in writing had always the singing voice and often the twangling string in mind. Their very age to my fancy gives them an enticing strangeness, grace, and freshness. For in their company the imagination returns to the days when first they rang out in the taverns and parlours and palaces and streets of a London that from every steeple and tower was within sight of green fields; a noble city of but about three hundred thousand people (including children) wherein you might any day find William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Chapman and the rest talking together in its taverns, the Mermaid or the Triple Tun, while that ill-fortuned traveller and statesman, Sir Walter Raleigh, fallen upon evil days, sat mewed up in the Tower of London, engrossed in his History of the World.

None the less there are human beings who remain deaf to the magic both of words and music—that, like the deaf adder, stop their ears: "I know very well," wrote Sir William Temple, "that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music as toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to these charms, would I think do well to keep their own counsel, for ... while this world lasts, I doubt most but the pleasure and requests of these two entertainments will do so too; and happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent; and do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them!

"When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

[211]. "The Onely Pretty Ring Time."

"Amo, amas,

I love a lass,

As cedar tall and slender;

Sweet cowslip's face

Is her nominative case,

And she's of the feminine gender.

Horum quorum,

Sunt divorum,

Harum, scarum, Divo;

Tag rag, merry derry, periwig and hatband,

Hic—hoc—hârum, genitivo."

John O'keefe

There was a mayde come out of Kent,

Deintie love, deintie love;

There was a mayde cam out of Kent,

Daungerous be:

There was a mayde cam out of Kent,

Fáyre, propre, small and gent,

As ever upon the grounde went,

For so should it be.

"When you speake (Sweet)

I'ld have you do it ever. When you sing,

I'ld have you buy and sell so: so give Almes,

Pray so: and for the ord'ring your Affayres,

To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you

Nothing but that: move still, still so:

And owne no other function....

My prettiest Perdita."

The Winter's Tale.

"Such pretie things would soon be gon

If we should not so them remembre."

[212].

There might be an instant's check or faltering at the eighth line, but make it "when the Winds Blow and the Seas Flow"—the great flood of air and water banking up as it were into the words as does the Atlantic in a gale at the Spring Equinox—and all's well.

[213]. "And the Fleas That Tease in the High Pyrenees."

"The flee is a lyttell worme, and greveth men mooste; and scapeth and voideth peril with lepynge and not with runnynge, and wexeth slowe and fayleth in colde tyme, and in somer tyme it wexeth quiver and swyft; and spareth not kynges."

[214]. "I Loved a Lass."

George Wither, says Aubrey, could make verses as fast as he could write them. So, too, could Shakespeare. "What he thought," said his editors, "he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers."

Still:—"So, So-a! fair and softly!" said the old Shropshire farmer to Job his plough-horse when he kicked up his heels as if to break into a gallop; "So, So-a! When thou'rt a racer, my dear, or born a high-blood Arab, there'll be time enough for that. Some goes their best slow."

If the lass's "fives" in the fourth stanza (of 214) were the fives of to-day she must have had a quite comfortable foot, a size or two larger, at any rate, than the bride's in Sir John Suckling's Ballad upon a Wedding:

... Her feet beneath her petticoat

Like little mice stole in and out,

As if they feared the light;

But oh, she dances such a way!

No sun upon an Easter-day

Is half so fine a sight.

Her cheeks so rare a white was on,

No daisy makes comparison;

Who sees them is undone;

For streaks of red were mingled there,

Such as are on a Catharine pear,

The side that's next the sun.

Her lips were red; and one was thin

Compared to that was next her chin

(Some bee had stung it newly);

But, Dick, her eyes so guard her face,

I durst no more upon them gaze,

Than on the sun in Júly....

[218]. "And St. John's Bell Rings for Matins."

June 24 is not only the birthday of St. John the Baptist, but also the year's Sun Day, for about this day, following through the night but a little way beneath the horizon, he rises at dawn furthest North of East in his annual journey (see p. xiv). As once on May-day so it was then formerly the custom, all England over, to set bonfires blazing on the hilltops, around which the country people danced and sang. The dairy-maid who had the breath, and was fleet enough of foot to ring around, between dusk and daybreak, nine such merry bonfires before they were burnt out, assured her heart of a happy marriage within the year.

[219]. "O It's Dabbling in the Dew Makes the Milkmaids Fair!"

The aïr to gi'e your cheäks a hue

O' rwosy red, so feaïr to view,

Is what do sheäke the grass-bleädes grae

At breäk o' dae, in mornén dew;

Vor vo'k that will be rathe abrode,

Will meet wi' health upon their road.

But biden up till dead o' night,

When han's o' clocks do stan' upright,

By candlelight, do soon consume

The feäce's bloom, an' turn it white.

An' moon-beäms cast vrom midnight skies

Do blunt the sparklen ov the eyes.

Vor health do weäke vrom nightly dreams

Below the mornen's eärly beams,

An' leäve the dead-aïr'd houses' eaves,

Vor quiv'ren leaves, an' bubblen streams,

A-glitt'ren brightly to the view,

Below a sky o' cloudless blue.

William Barnes

The words in this poem are spelt as they are spoken in the County of Dorset. "Rathe" means early; and "below" beneath. There is a half-secret rhyme in each fourth line.

[223]. "Music, When Soft Voices Die, Vibrates in The Memory."

There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Tennyson

[224]. "A Bell in Moscow." (stanza 4)

Of this I saw the picture in Thrae. It was named Czar Kolokol, and, when cast, was of the weight of about twenty-six hundred heavy men. It now stands clapperless on the ground with a breach in its metal side. Through this breach the people go into its silence to pray.

[225].

This "Country Rhime," with Nos. 121 and 434, is taken from A Book for Boys and Girls, written by John Bunyan. It came out into the world on May 12th, 1686, two years before Bunyan died on Snow Hill in London; and two years after the publication of the Second Part of The Pilgrim's Progress, "wherein is set forth the manner of the setting out of Christian's Wife and Children, their dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the Desired Country."

When Bunyan was young he loved ringing the bells with the ringers in the steeple of the village church of Elstow, where he was born, and where his grandfather, Thomas Bonyon, was "a common baker of human bread."

All these "Homely rhimes" are followed in this particular Book for Boys and Girls by comparisons", as here: first the bells; then a lesson about them. They are parables. But in Mr. Nahum's copying, many of the lessons were omitted; perhaps because he preferred to think out his own. Not that the poetry that is intended to teach, to praise virtue, and to instil wisdom in the heart and mind of its readers is any the less poetry for this reason. Nevertheless, every beautiful thing in this world—the hyssop in the wall and the cedar of Lebanon, Solomon in all his glory and the ring on his finger, carries with it joy and wonder of the life that is ours, and gratitude to the Maker of all. And poets who, when writing, are too intent upon teaching, are apt to forfeit their rarest poetry.

[232].

Dorothy was William Wordsworth's only sister and his friend Coleridge's close friend. What she squandered on these two poets—her self, her talk, her imagination, her love—only they could tell. "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears," once wrote her brother; she shared his visionary happiness. With Coleridge she used to walk and talk so nearly and dearly that again and again in her Journal she uses all but the very words—that "thin gray cloud," the line on Spring, or on the one red leaf, for instance—which are so magically his own in Christabel (No. 345).

[233]. "To Autumn."

I read this—perhaps the loveliest of John Keats's odes, many times before I realised that the whole of it is addressed to the musing apparition or phantasm of Autumn whom in its second stanza he describes as if she were in image there before him. This, perhaps, was partly because the poem is usually printed with a full stop after "clammy cells," and partly because of my own stupidity.

Thomas Hood, in his scarcely less beautiful Ode, sees Autumn first as an old man:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

Stand shadowless like Silence, listening

To silence, for no lonely bird would sing

Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,

Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;

Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright

With tangled gossamer that fell by night,

Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

And later, in his fourth stanza:

The squirrel gloats on his accomplished hoard,

The ants have brimmed their garners with ripe grain,

And honey bees have stored

The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;

The swallows all have winged across the main;

But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,

And sighs her tearful spells

Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.

Alone, alone,

Upon a mossy stone,

She sits and reckons up the dead and gone,

With the last leaves for a love-rosary,

Whilst all the withered world looks drearily,

Like a dim picture of the drownèd past

In the hushed mind's mysterious far away,

Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last

Into that distance, gray upon the gray....

[237]. "A Foolish Thing."

I thee advise

If thou be wise

To keep thy wit

Though it be small:

'Tis rare to get.

And far to fet,

'Twas ever yet

Dear'st ware of all.

George Turberville

"Far to fetch" it certainly is; but here is a little counsel to this end from the old Irish Instructions of King Cormac (of the ninth century). Of Carbery I know no more, but doubtless there is much to hear:

"O Cormac, grandson of Conn," said Carbery, "what is the worst for the body of man?"

"Not hard to tell," said Cormac. "Sitting too long, lying too long, long standing, lifting heavy things, exerting oneself beyond one's strength, running too much, leaping too much, frequent falls, sleeping with one's leg over the bed-rail, gazing at glowing embers, wax, biestings [very new milk], new ale, bull-flesh, curdles, dry food, bog-water, rising too early, cold, sun, hunger, drinking too much, eating too much, sleeping too much, sinning too much, grief, running up a height, shouting against the wind, drying oneself by a fire, summer-dew, winter-dew, beating ashes, swimming on a full stomach, sleeping on one's back, foolish romping." ...

"O Cormac, grandson of Conn," said Carbery, "I desire to know how I shall behave among the wise and the foolish, among friends and strangers, among the old and the young, among the innocent and the wicked."

"Not hard to tell," said Cormac.

"Be not too wise, nor too foolish,

Be not too conceited, nor too diffident,

Be not too haughty, nor too humble,

Be not too talkative, nor too silent,

Be not too hard, nor too feeble.

If you be too wise, men will expect too much of you;

If you be too foolish, you will be deceived;

If you be too conceited, you will be thought vexatious;

If you be too humble, you will be without honour;

If you be too talkative, you will not be heeded;

If you be too silent, you will not be regarded;

If you be too bard, you will be broken;

If you be too feeble, you will be crushed."

But what the exact total of all these "too's" may be is a riddle only the Higher Mathematics can solve.

"Our Play is done"

—after which, in Elizabeth's day, "the characters (one or more) were wont to kneel down upon the stage and to offer a solemn prayer for the sovereign, or other patron":

"My tongue is wearie; when my Legs are too, I will bid you good night; and so kneele down before you: But (indeed) to pray for the Queene."

Henry IV.

[245]. "Ah! would 'twere so."

I know that all beneath the moon decays,

And what by mortals in this world is brought

In Time's great periods shall return to nought;

That fairest states have fatal nights and days;

I know how all the Muse's heavenly lays,

With toil of spright which is so dearly bought,

As idle sounds, of few or none are sought;

And that nought lighter is than airy praise.

I know frail beauty's like the purple flower,

To which one morn oft birth and death affords;

That love a jarring is of minds' accords,

Where sense and will invassall reason's power.

Know what I list, this all can not me move,

But that—O me! I both must write and love!

William Drummond

[246]. "No Crane talks." (line 16)

"I hear the crane, if I mistake not, cry

Who in the clouds forming the forked Y,

By the brave orders practized under her,

Instructeth souldiers in the art of war.

For when her troops of wandring cranes forsake

Frost-firmèd Strymon, and (in autumn) take

Truce with the northern dwarfs, to seek adventure

In southern climates for a milder winter;

A-front each band a forward captain flies,

Whose pointed bill cuts passage through the skies,

Two skilful sergeants keep the ranks aright,

And with their voyce hasten their tardy flight;

And when the honey of care-charming sleep

Sweetly begins through all their veines to creep

One keeps the watch, and ever carefull-most,

Walks many a round about the sleeping hoast,

Still holding in his claw a stony clod,

Whose fall may wake him if he hap to nod.

Another doth as much, a third, a fourth,

Untill, by turns the night be turnèd forth."

So also, according to travellers, talk, argue in parliament, camp, and keep watch the wandering tribes of the gaudy-dyed Baboons.

[249].

If this poem is read softly, pausingly, without haste, the very words will seem like snowflakes themselves, floating into the mind; and then, the beauty and the wonder.

[251]

Here again, as in music, there are rests in the second, fourth and fifth lines of each stanza. Is there any magic to compare with that still solemn unearthly radiance when the world is masked with snow; and the very sparkling of the mind is like hoar-frost on the bark of a tree.

[253]. "The Wild Woods."

Allan Cunningham's in Scotland, and these—Mr. Robert Frost's—in Vermont U.S.A.:

Whose Woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though

He will not see my stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake,

The only other sounds the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely dark and deep;

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep:

And miles to go before I sleep.

[255].

There may be a few small verbal puzzles in this fifteenth-century carol—otherwise as clear, sharp and shining as a winter moon.

Kechoun is kitchen, and Stephen (who waited on the King at bed and board) stepped out of it into the hall, "boar's head on hand." Kyst, means cast; eylet, aileth; wod is mad. So too brede, I fancy. When the roasted capon or cock crowed in its dish, Herod, in wrath and fear cried on his torturers, "by two and all by one" to rise up and kill.

In later times a clay or earthenware box made all of a piece, with a slit in it, was carried by apprentices through the streets on St. Stephen's day, for money. And never a Catholic missionary once sailed for the Indies, Barbary, or the Islands of the Anthropophagites, but a box was hung by the priests in the church for alms against his return. From the former old custom comes our "Boxing Day."

In the Isle of Man, however, the Christmas Box was called the Wren Box, and for this reason: There dwelt of old a Lorelei, siren or sea-elf, in the emerald green creeks and caves of a solitary precipitous island. She was as lovely as she was cruel, and her shrill sweet voice rose amid the roaring and soughing of the waves in her steep rocky habitation as shines a poisonous flower in the dark of a forest. Thus she would at daybreak enchant to their doom sailors following their craft on the sea. Leaning to listen to this music creeping by them on the waters, they drew in to her haunts. Of their bones were coral made; while she lived on; sang on. She was hunted down at last in her sea-grottoes by those who, like Ulysses, had stopped their ears against her incantations. Brought finally to bay, her beauty and bright hair suddenly dwindled and dimmed, and she escaped in the shape of—Jenny Wren. Alas, for Jenny Wren! condemned ever after for the woes of this siren to be pursued with sticks and stones by young loons, cullions and Jerry Sneaks, on every St. Stephen's Day. As goes the rhyme:

"Oh, where are you going?" says milder to melder;

"Oh, where are you going?" says the younger to the elder.

"Oh, I cannot tell," says Festel to Fose;

"We're going to the woods," says John the Red Nose.

"We're going to the woods," says John the Red Nose.

"Oh, what will you do there?" says milder to melder;

"Oh, what will you do there?" says the younger to the elder.

"Oh, I do not know," says Festel to Fose;

"To shoot the cutty wren," says John the Red Nose.

"To shoot the cutty wren," says John the Red Nose.

"Oh, what of her corpsums?" etc. etc.,

and a sinister company they look, especially "milder"!

[257].

Lullay, lullay, thou lytill child,

Sleep and be well still;

The King of bliss thy father is,

As it was his will.

The other night I saw a sight,

A mayd a cradle keep:

"Lullay," she sung, and said among,

"Lie still, my child, and sleep."

"How should I sleep? I may not for weep,

So sore am I begone:

Sleep I would; I may not for cold,

And clothes have I none.

"For Adam's guilt mankind is spilt

And that me rueth sore;

For Adam and Eve here shall I live

Thirty winter and more."

[258]. "Welcome Twelfth Day"

and here is a rhyme (entitled Jolagiafir) for a memory-game they used to play in old times on Twelfth Night after the bean or silver-penny had been discovered in the Twelfth Cake, and the Wassail Bowl has gone round with the Mince Pies.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

A partridge in a pear-tree.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear-tree.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Three French hens, two turtle doves and

A partridge in a pear-tree.

And so on to—

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Twelve lords a-leaping, eleven ladies dancing,

Ten pipers piping, nine drummers drumming,

Eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming,

Six geese a-laying, five gold rings,

Four colly birds, three French hens,

Two turtle doves, and

A partridge in a pear-tree.

And here is a recipe for Lamb's Wool, with which to fill "the Bowl": Take "the pulpe of rosted apples, in number four or five according to the greatnesse of the apples (especially the pome water), and mix it heartily in a wine quart of faire water"—or old ale—"with a due and fair lacing of nutmegs, sugar and ginger"—until the company can wait no longer.

And here's another "Twelve"; from Scotland:

What will be our twelve, boys?

What will be our twelve, boys?

Twelve's the Twelve Apostles;

Eleven's maidens in a dance;

Ten's the Ten Commandments;

Nine's the Muses o' Parnassus;

Eight's the table rangers;

Seven's the stars of heaven;

Six the echoing waters;

Five's the hymnlers o' my bower;

Four's the gospel-makers;

Three, three thrivers;

Twa's the lily and the rose,

That shine baith red and green, boys:

My only ane, she walks alane,

And evermair has dune, boys.

[259].

It looks as if this carol—of Henry VI.'s reign—was once a singing game: On the one side in the blaze of the Yule Log the Holly men with gilded and garlanded pole; and on the other Ivy with her maidens; each side taunting the other, and maybe tugging for prisoners. "Ivy-girls," too, used to be burned by companies of boys, and Holly-boys by girls—all yawping and jodelling at the sport.

"Poppynguy" may perhaps be the jay, but it would be pleasanter company for the lark, if here it means the green woodpecker. His other names are rain-bird, hew-hole, wood-sprite, woodweele, woodspeek and yaffle, the very sound of which is like the echo of his own laughter in the sunny green tops of the wood.

[260]. "When Isicles hang by the Wall."

There is a peculiar magic (which may perhaps be less apparent to the Greenlanders) in icicles. Nor are its effects unknown to the four-footed. In certain remote regions of Siberia there is said to be a little animal called the Iccė-vulff (or Ice-wolf). He has prick-ears, is a fierce feeder, and wears a coat so wondrous close and dense that three or four of our English moles' skins laid one atop the other would yet fall short of its match. But he seldom attains to a ripe age, and for this reason. As soon as he is freed from his dam's snow-burrow, he hastes off to the dwellings of the men of those parts, snuffing their dried seal-steaks and blubber, being a most incorrigible thief and a very wary. And such is his craft that he mocks at gins, traps and pitfalls. But he has a habit which is often to his undoing. It is in this wise: The heat of these hovels is apt to melt a little the snow upon them, its water trickling and coursing softly down till long, keen icicles are formed, upon which, whether hungry or fed, taking up his station in a plumb line beneath them, he will squat and gloat for an hour together, having a marvellous greedy pleasure in clear glasslike colours. Hearing his breathing or faint snuffing, any human who wakes within will of a sudden violently shake the wall between. This dislodges the pendent icicles, and the squatting Iccė-vulff is pierced to his death as with a sword.

Winter indeed makes crystal even of ink. It has the power of enchanting every imagination; and particularly Coleridge's:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon....

[264]. "Woe weeps out Her Division when She sings."

This means, I think, that she adds her own grieved cadences to the melody, as may one, among many voices, singing in harmony.

[265]. "Is like a Bubble."

This rainbow "bubble"—like Shelley's "many-coloured dome of glass" in his Adonais—seems, before our very eyes, to be floating up into the empty blue heavens, until it smalls into a bead of gold, and vanishes. It brings to memory—though I am uncertain of the first line—an epitaph in the church at Zennor, a village clustered above the Atlantic on the dreamlike coast of Cornwall—an epitaph cut in fine lettering into its slate slab, while at each corner of the slab Cherubs' heads puff out their round cheeks, representing the winds of the world:

Sorrow, and sin, false hope, and trouble—

These the Four Winds that daily vex this Bubble:

His breath a Vapour, and his life a Span;

'Tis Glorious Misery to be born a Man.

[266]. "O, Sweet Content."

There is a jewel which no Indian mines

Can buy, no chymic art can counterfeit;

It makes men rich in greatest poverty;

Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold,

The homely whistle to sweet music's strain:

Seldom it comes, to few from heaven sent,

That much in little, all in naught—Content.

"Art Thou poor ... Art Thou rich."

The subject being riches, here from Hugh Rhodes, is a nourishing crumb or two of advice. Cautions the poem is called, and it may be found in the Book of Nurture:

He that spendeth much,

And getteth nought;

He that oweth much,

And hath nought;

He that looketh in his purse

And findeth nought,—

He may be sorry,

And say nought.

He that may and will not,

He then that would shall not.

He that would and cannot

May repent and sigh not.

He that sweareth

Till no man trust him;

He that lieth

Till no man believe him;

He that borroweth

Till no man will lend him;

Let him go where

No man knoweth him.

He that hath a good master,

And cannot keep him;

He that hath a good servant,

And is not content with him;

He that hath such conditions,

That no man loveth him;

May well know other,

But few men will know him.

And, to make trebly sure:

Three false sisters: "Perhaps," "May be," "I dare say."

Three timid brothers: "Hush!" "Stop!" "Listen!"

[269]. "Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed."

The most ancient poem I know of consists of such a sigh. It comes from an Egyptian tomb, was composed about 5000 years ago, and might have been written by some melancholy soul at his sick-room window yesterday afternoon. For, after all, these ancients whose mummies are now a mere wonder for the curious, all lived, as Raleigh says, "in the same newness of time which we call 'old time.'"

"Death is before me to-day

Like the recovery of a sick man,

Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

"Death is before me to-day

Like the odour of myrrh,

Like sitting under the sail on a windy day....

"Death is before me to-day

Like the course of the freshet,

Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house....

"Death is before me to-day

As a man longs to see his house

When he has spent years in captivity."

[272]. "These Strong and Fair...."

And here is another poem by William Barnes which I have ventured to spell not as it appears in its original dialect, but in the usual way:

If souls should only shine as bright

In heaven as in earthly light,

And nothing better were the case,

How comely still, in shape and face,

Would many reach that happy place,—

The hopeful souls that in their prime,

Have seemed a-taken before their time—

The young that died in beauty.

But when one's limbs have lost their strength

A-toiling through a lifetime's length,

And over cheeks a-growing old

The slowly-wasting years have rolled

The deepening wrinkles' hollow fold;

When life is ripe, then death do call

For less of thought, than when it fall

On young folks in their beauty....

But still the dead shall more than keep

The beauty of their early sleep;

Where comely looks shall never wear

Uncomely, under toil and care,

The fair, at death be always fair,

Still fair to living, thought and love,

And fairer still to God above,

Than when they died in beauty.

[273].

I remember actually coming upon this poem (in Mr. Nahum's second book), and how I twisted my head and looked up at the quiet dark-socketed skull in its alcove in the turret room. It had no alarm for me then, though I can recall cold moments of dread or confusion, when I was a boy, at the thought of death. Then—or was it some time after?—I turned the page and found the following poem by Thomas Campion, and, in Mr. Nahum's writing, this scrawl at the foot of it: "Yes, but the vision first."

The man of life upright,

Whose guiltless heart is free

From all dishonest deeds,

Or thought of vanity;

The man whose silent days

In harmless joys are spent,

Whom hopes cannot delude

Nor sorrow discontent:

That man needs neither towers

Nor armour for defence,

Nor secret vaults to fly

From thunder's violence:

He only can behold

With unaffrighted eyes

The horrors of the deep

And terrors of the skies.

Thus scorning all the cares

That fate or fortune brings,

He makes the heaven his book,

His wisdom heavenly things;

Good thoughts his only friends,

His wealth a well-spent age,

The earth his sober inn

And quiet pilgrimage.

" ... Yet suffer us, O Lord, not to repine, whether in the morning, at noon, or at midnight, that is to say, in our cradle, in our youth, or old age, we go to take our long sleep; but let us make this reckoning of our years, that if we can live no longer, that is unto us our old age; for he that liveth so long as thou appointest him (though he die in the pride of his beauty) dieth an old man...."

[274]. "Adieu! farewell Earth's Bliss."

This solemn dirge was written in "time of pestilence,"—such a time as Daniel Defoe tells of in his "Journal of the Plague Year." The Elizabethan poets brooded endlessly on the mystery of death. A music haunts their words like that of muffled bells, as in John Fletcher's poem:

... Come hither, you that hope, and you that cry,

Leave off complaining!

Youth, strength, and beauty, that shall never die,

Are here remaining.

Come hither, fools, and blush you stay so long

From being blessed.

And mad men, worse than you, that suffer wrong,

Yet seek no rest!...

And in William Davenant's:

Wake, all the dead! What ho! what ho!

How soundly they sleep whose pillows lie low!

They mind not poor lovers, who walk above

On the decks of the world in storms of love.

No whisper now nor glance shall pass

Through wickets or through panes of glass,

For our windows and doors are shut and barred.

Lie close in the church, and in the churchyard!

In every grave make room, make room!

The world's at an end, and we come, we come!...

[275]. "I who loved with all my life Love with all my death."

Not full twelve years twice-told, a weary breath

I have exchanged for a wishèd death.

My course was short, the longer is my rest,

God takes them soonest whom he loveth best;

For he that's born to-day and dies to-morrow,

Loseth some days of mirth, but months of sorrow.

And this reminds me of an epitaph I chanced on in the graveyard at Manorbier whose ruinous castle towers above the green turf of its narrow ocean inlet, as if it were keeping a long tryst with the clocked church tower on the height:

Weep not for her ye friends that's dear,

Weep for your sins, for death is near—

You see by her, she [was] cut down soon.

Her morning Sun went down at noon.

And then there are these two unforgettable fragments, the one from the Scots of John Wedderburn (1542), and the other of a century before, its authorship unknown:

Who's at my Window?

Who's at my window, who, who?

Go from my window, go, go!

Who calleth there so like a stranger?

Go from my window—go!

Lord, I am here, a wretched mortal

That for Thy mercy does cry and call—

Unto Thee, my Lord Celestial,

See who is at my window, who.

The Call.

... Come home again, come home again;

Mine own sweet heart, come home again!

You are gone astray

Out of your way,

Therefore, sweet heart, come home again!

[277]. "Hark! now everything is still."

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear;

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.

Walter Savage Landor

"'Tis now full tide 'tween Night and Day." (line 17)

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust;

And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;

Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;

Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.

Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might

To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;

Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light,

That doth both shine and give us sight to see.

O, take fast hold! let that light be thy guide

In this small course which birth draws out to death—

And think how evil becometh him to slide,

Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.

Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see:

Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.

Sir Philip Sidney

[278].

Of the Lyke-wake Dirge is known neither the age nor the author. The body from which the "saule" or spirit within is fled away lies in its shroud, and the dirge tells of that spirit's journey. Its word "sleet," says Mr. Sidgwick, means either salt, for it was the custom to place in a wooden platter beside the dead, earth and salt for emblems, the one of corruption, the other of the immortal; or, as some suppose, "sleet" should be fleet, meaning embers or water or house-room. "Whinnies" means gorse. To explain the full meaning of Bridge of Dread would need many pages—but does not much of that meaning haunt in the very music and solemnity of the words?

[279].

Next this poem in Mr. Nahum's book was "Lead, Kindly Light," and there was a strange picture for it hanging in the round tower—the picture of a small becalmed ship, clumsy of rig and low in the water which was smooth and green as glass. In the midst of the ship there was piled high what might be taken for a vast heap of oranges, their fair reddish colour blazing in the rays of the sun that was about to plunge out of the greenish sky below the line of the west. But what even more particularly attracted my eye at the time was that ship's figurehead—a curious head and shoulders as if with wings, and of a kind of far beauty or wonder entirely past me to describe. Many years afterwards I read that this poem was written by John Henry Newman (one who even in his young days at Oxford was "never less alone than when alone"), when his mind was perplexed and unhappy, and he himself had time to ponder awhile, because the boat in which he was sailing to England had been for some days becalmed off the coast of Spain.

[281]. "Fear no more."

Philaster.Fie, fie,

So young and so dissembling! fear'st thou not death?

Can boys contemn that?

Bellario.O, what boy is he

Can be content to live to be a man,

That sees the best of men thus passionate,

Thus without reason?

Philaster.O, but thou dost not know what 'tis to die.

Bellario.Yes, I do know, my Lord!

'Tis less than to be born; a lasting sleep,

A quiet resting from all jealousy;

A thing we all pursue; I know besides

It is but giving over of a game

That must be lost.

From Philaster: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

[284]. "All the Flowers."

" ... But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three—that is, burnet, wild thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread."

An Essay on Gardens, Francis Bacon

Bring, too, some branches forth of Daphne's hair,

And gladdest myrtle for the posts to wear,

With spikenard weaved and marjorams between

And starred with yellow-golds and meadows-queen.

The very names indeed of the aromatic herbs seem to "perfume the air"—bergamot, lavender, meadowsweet, costmary, southernwood, woodruff, balm, germander. And flowers even though dead remain sweet in their dust, as every bowl of potpourri proclaims. To have "a repository of odours" always with them, when streets were foul and pestilence was a peril, gentle-people would in old times carry fresh nosegays or pomanders. The pomanders were of many kinds; an orange stuffed with cloves, etc., for the hand; or—for pocket or chatelaine—some little curiously-devised receptacle of silver containing tiny phials of precious essences—possibly no bigger than a plum. Or they might be compounded of rare ingredients: "Your only way to make a good pomander is this. Take an ounce of the purest garden mould, cleansed and steeped seven days in change of motherless rose water. Then take the best labdanum, benjoin, both storaxes, ambergris, civet, and musk. Incorporate them together, and work them into what form you please. This, if your breath be not too valiant, will make you smell as sweet as any lady's dog."

[285].

I have pondered over the thirteenth and eighteenth lines of this poem, but am not yet certain of all that they were intended to convey. But what scope for the imagination is in it! The next epitaph is by Stephen Hawes, whose Passetyme of Pleasure or History of Graunde Amoure, and La Bel Pucel, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509:

O mortal folk, you may behold and see

How I lie here, sometime a mighty knight.

The end of joy and all prosperity

Is death at last, thorough his course and might:

For though the day be never so long,

At last the bells ringeth to evensong.

And the lines following are said to have been found between the pages of Sir Walter Raleigh's Bible in the Gate House at Westminster, having been written by him, it is surmised, during the night before he—an ageing man of sixty-six—was beheaded:

Even such is Time, that takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, our all we have,

And pays us but with earth and dust;

Who, in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days.

But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

My God shall raise me up, I trust.

[286]. "Sidney, O Sidney is dead."

"Sir Philip Sydney, Knight," says John Aubrey, "was the most accomplished courtier of his time. He was not only of an excellent witt, but extremely beautiful; he much resembled his sister. He was a person of great courage. Among others Mr. Edmund Spenser made his addresse to him, and brought his Faery Queen. Sir Philip was busy at his study, and his servant delivered Mr. Spenser's booke to his master, who layd it by, thinking it might be such kind of stuffe as he was frequently troubled with. When Sir Philip perused it, he was so exceedingly delighted with it, that he was extremely sorry he was gonne, and where to send for him he knew not. After much enquiry he learned his lodgeing, and sent for him, and mightily caressed him.... From this time there was a great friendship between them, to his dying day.... His body was putt in a leaden coffin (which after the firing of Paule's, I myself sawe), and with wonderfull greate state was carried to St. Paule's church, when he was buried in our Ladie's Chapell. There solempnized this funerall all the nobility and great officers of Court."

Here is part of a letter written to him, by his father, Sir Henry Sidney, in 1566, when Philip was a boy at Shrewsbury School:

Son Philip.... Above all things, tell no untruth. No, not in trifles. The custom of it is nought: and let it not satisfy you that, for a time, the hearers take it for a truth; yet after it will be known as it is, to your shame. For there cannot be a greater reproach to a gentleman, than to be accounted a liar.... Remember, my son! the noble blood you are descended of by your mother's side: and think that only by virtuous life and good action you may be an ornament to that illustrious family; otherwise, through vice and sloth, you may be counted labes generis, "a spot of your kin," one of the greatest curses that can happen to man.

This next fragment is from a letter written on October 18, 1580, by Sir Philip Sidney himself to his younger brother Robert (then seventeen). This Robert six years afterwards fought with him at Zutphen. He grew up a gallant gentleman, was created Earl of Leicester, and in his leisure wrote words to fit the music of John Dowland—afterwards lutenist to Charles I.

My Dear Brother,

For the money you have received, assure yourself (for it is true), there is nothing I spend so pleaseth me; as that which is for you. If ever I have ability, you shall find it so: if not, yet shall not any brother living be better beloved than you, of me.... Look to your diet, sweet Robin! and hold your heart in courage and virtue. Truly, great part of my comfort is in you!.... Be careful of yourself, and I shall never have cares.... I write this to you as one, that for myself have given over the delight in the world; but wish to you as much, if not more, than to myself.... God bless you, sweet Boy! and accomplish the joyful hope I conceive of you.... Lord how I have babbled! Once again, farewell, dearest Brother!

Your most loving and careful brother,

Philip Sidney

And here in a few words is a fleeting glimpse of this renowned man as he appeared amidst the splendour and magnificence of the Tournament, during the Anjou Fetes in London, in 1581, five years before his death:

"Then proceeded Master Philip Sidney, in very sumptuous manner with armour part blue and the rest gilt and engraven.... He had four pages that rode on his four spare horses" (richly caparisoned in gold and pearls and feathers of silver) "who had cassock hats and Venetian hose all of cloth of silver laid with gold lace and hats of the same with gold bands and white feathers: and each one a pair of white buskins." ... There followed him in as rich and splendid array his gentlemen, yeomen, and trumpeters.

[287]. "His Picture in a Sheet."

Of John Donne's Book of Poems there was nothing in Mr. Nahum's first volume, much in the others. But what I then read of them I little understood. It is a poetry that awaits the mind as the body grows older, and when we have ourselves learned the experience of life with which it is concerned. Not that the simplest poetry will then lose anything of its grace and truth and beauty—far rather it shines the more clearly, since age needs it the more.

"His Picture in a sheet" refers to a drawing (prefixed to Donne's Poems') of his stone effigy. This shows him draped with a shroud, and may now be seen in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which he was the dean, and in whose pulpit a few days before his death he preached his last valedictory or farewell sermon.

"Living to Eternity."

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill!...

Who God doth late and early pray

More of his grace than gifts to lend;

And entertains the harmless day

With a well chosen book or friend;

This man is freed from servile bands

Of hope to rise or fear to fall:

Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all.

Sir Thomas More was such a man. On Monday, July 5th, 1535, the night before he was beheaded, he wrote ("with a cole") this letter of farewell to his daughter Margaret Roper. He had seen her for the last time when she openly met and kissed him in the midst of his enemies and of the throngs on Tower Wharf, as he came from Judgment:

"Oure Lorde Blesse you good daughter, & youre good husbande, & youre lyttle boye, & all yours, & all my children, & all my Godde chyldren and all oure frendes.... I cumber you good Margaret much, but I would be sory, if it should be any longer than to morow. For it is saint Thomas even, & the utas of saint Peter: & therfore to morow long I to go to God: it were a day verye mete & convenient for me. I never liked your maner toward me better, than whan you kissed me laste: for I love when doughterly love, and deere charitye, hath no leysure to loke to worldlye curtesy. Farewell my dere chylde, & pray for me & I shall for you & all youre frendes, that we maye merilye mete in heaven...."

[288]. "Do Thou the same."

So too Walter Savage Landor:

... Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold

Than daisies in the mould,

Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,

His name, and life's brief date.

Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be,

And, O, pray too for me!

[290]. "A pretty Bud."

"To die young," in William Drummond's words, "is to do that soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do; it is but the giving over of a game, that after never so many hazards must be lost."

[291]. "A-left asleep."

May! Be thou never graced with birds that sing,

Nor Flora's pride!

In thee all flowers and roses spring—

Mine, only died.

In obitum MS. X^o Maij. 1614, William Browne

[293]. "Sunk Lyonesse."

There is a legend—recorded in an ancient monastic chronicle—that in the days of Arthur there stretched between Land's End and the Scillies a country of castles, of fair towns, and landscapes, named Lyonesse. When the tumult of the last great Arthurian battle was over, there befell a cataclysm of nature, and in a night of tempest this whole region was engulfed beneath the seas.

What truth is in this legend no certain history relates. But when the vast Atlantic breakers begin to lull after storm, to lie listening in the watches of the night is to hear, it would seem, deep-sunken belfries of bells sounding in the waters, and siren-like lamentations. I have myself heard this, and fantasy though it may be, if the ear is once beguiled into its deceit, the bells clash and chime on and on in the imagination, mingled with the enormous lully of the surges, until at last, one falls asleep.

[299]. "Sing no sad Songs for Me."

—and here is another such happy and tender word of farewell—but from one unknown:

When from the world I should be ta'en,

And from earth's necessary pain,

Then let no blacks be worn for me,

Not in a ring, my dear, by thee.

But this bright diamond, let it be

Worn in rememberance of me.

And when it sparkles in your eye,

Think 'tis my shadow passeth by.

[302]. "Readen ov a Head-Stwone."

This poem, again, is spelt as the words would be pronounced by the country people of Dorset, the country in which William Barnes was born and lived nearly all his long life. Their way of speech is slower than in common English, and the words, especially those with the two dots, or diaeresis, over them, should be lingered over a little in pronouncing them.

Londoners have a way of being scornfully amused at country speech—in their ignorance that it is older and far more beautiful than their own clipped and nasal manner of talking. But half an hour with the great Dialect Dictionary will prove how inexhaustibly rich the English language once was and still is in words made, used, and loved by folk unlearned in books, but with keen and lively eyes in their heads, quick to see the delight and livingness of a thing, and with the wits to give it a name fitting it as close as a skin.

[303]. "Care is heavy."

Dear God, though Thy all-powerful hand

Should so direct my earthly fate

That I may seem unfortunate

To them who do not understand

That all things follow Thy decree,

Staunchly I'll bear what e'er's Thy will—

Praying Thee but to grant me still

That none shall come to harm through me;

For, God, although Thou knowest all,

I am too young to comprehend

The windings to my journey's end;

I fear upon the road to fall

In the worst sin of all that be

And thrust my brother in the sea.

Conal O'Riordan

[304]. "Mother, never mourn."

"It was my own mother (wrote Thomas Cantimpratanus about 1260) who told me the story which I am about to relate. My grandmother had a firstborn son of most excellent promise, comely beyond the wont of children, at whose death she mourned ... with a grief that could not be consoled, until one day, as she went by the way, she saw in her vision a band of youths moving onwards, as it seemed to her, with exceeding great joy; and she, remembering her son and weeping that she saw him not in this joyful band, suddenly beheld him trailing weary footsteps after the rest. Then with a grievous cry the mother asked: 'How comes it, my son, that thou goest alone, lagging thus behind the rest?' Then he opened the side of his cloak and showed her a heavy water-pot, saying: 'Behold, dear mother, the tears which thou hast vainly shed for me, through the weight whereof I must needs linger behind the rest! Thou therefore shalt turn thy tears to God: then only shall I be freed from the burden wherewith I am now grieved.'"

But not all dreamers are so rebuked or so comforted. St. Augustine, a loving son, pined in vain:

"If the dead could come in dreams," he wrote, "my pious mother would no night fail to visit me. Far be the thought that she should, by a happier life, have been made so cruel that, when aught vexes my heart, she should not even console in a dream the son whom she loved with an only love."

[310]. Tom o' Bedlam.

This poem has been at hide-and-seek with the world for many years past. Mr. Frank Sidgwick has now played Seek, however, and has tracked it down in the British Museum in a manuscript, No. 24665, inscribed "Giles Earle—his book, 1615." In this manuscript the poem consists of eight stanzas of ten lines each, with a chorus of five lines. The version in this book is only of twenty-five lines, as they were arranged by Mrs. Meynell in her beautiful Anthology, The Flower of the Mind. Here are the chief differences which Mr. Sidgwick has very kindly allowed me to collect from his account of his search:

Line 1, "moon" is morn. Line 2, "lovely" is lonely, "marrow" is morrow. Line 10, "rounded" is wounded. Line 16, "a heart" is a host. And line 21, "with" is by. It is a happy exercise of the wits to choose between them and to find reasons for one's choice. When and by whom the poem was written is not yet known. It remains a shining jewel in the crown of the most modest of all men of genius, Mr. Anon.

[314]. "What's in there."

This far-carrying rhyme belongs to the ancient and famous game of Dump. "He who speaks first in it," says Dr. Gregor, "or laughs first, or lets his teeth be seen, gets nine nips, nine nobs, nine double douncornes, an' a gueed blow on the back o' the head."

The faht and fahr, I suppose, are the pleasant Scots way of saying what and where.

[316].

So may the omission of a few commas effect a wonder in the imagination. To the imagination indeed there is nothing absurd in, "I saw the sun at twelve o'clock at night"—for one can actually see in the "little nowhere of the mind" both burning sun and black night together: as once in a dream I myself was enchanted by three moons in the sky, shining in their silver above waters as wide as those of Milton's curfew. So, too, even mere day-by-day objects will take on themselves a strangeness and beauty never seen or "marked" before, if (like Marcus Aurelius and his loaf of bread) we will only "glut" the eye on them. "I see a rose," said an old woman on her deathbed, "but if, in childhood and youth, I had seen it closer, what a rose on the threshold it had been!"

Here is another old nursery "nonsense" rhyme that makes almost as lively pictures in the mind:

There was a man of double deed

Who sowed his garden full of seed;

And when the seed began to grow,

'Twas like a garden full of snow;

And when the snow began to fall,

Like birds it was upon the wall;

And when the birds began to fly,

'Twas like a shipwreck in the sky;

And when the sky began to crack,

'Twas like a stick upon my back;

And when my back began to smart,

'Twas like a pen-knife in my heart;

And when my heart began to bleed,

Then I was dead—and dead indeed.

[319]. "It Had Become a Glimmering Girl."

"The Tuatha De Danaan—the divine Children of Danu which forgotten centuries ago invaded Ireland—can take all shapes, and those that are in the waters take often the shape of fish. A woman of Burren, in Galway, says, 'There are more of them in the sea than on the land ...,' and another Galway woman says, 'Surely those things are in the sea as well as on land. My father was out fishing one night off Tyrone. And something came beside the boat that had eyes shining like candles. And then a wave came in, and a storm rose all in a minute, and whatever was in the wave, the weight of it had like to sink the boat. And then they saw that it was a woman in the sea that had the shining eyes. So my father went to the priest, and he bid him always to take a drop of holy water and a pinch of salt out in the boat with him, and nothing could harm him.'"

W. B. Yeats

[321]. "One Without."

Was it the sound of a footfall I heard

On the cold flag stone?

Or the cry of a wandering far night bird,

On the sea-winds blown?

Was that a human shape that stood?

In the shadow below,

Or but the mist of the moonlit wood

As it hovered low?

Was it the voice of a child that called

From the hill side steep?

Or, O, but the wind as it softly lulled

The world to sleep?

Elizabeth Ramal

[325]. "Broome, Broome on Hill."

The story is of how a bright lady comes to keep her tryst with a knight-at-arms in the golden broom of Hive Hill. She finds him under a charm, an enchantment, asleep; and having left her ring on his finger for proof of her coming, she steals away. Presently after he awakes—her presence gone. To leave a quiet and happy room vacant at night is sometimes to have this experience, as it were, reversed. There comes a feeling that you being gone, gentler visitants may enter and share its solitude—while its earthly occupant sleeps overhead, and one by one the stars sink to their setting.

[326]. "The Changeling."

When larks gin sing

Away we fling,

And babes new-born steal as we go;

An elf instead

We leave in bed,

And wind out, laughing, Ho, ho, ho!

[329]. "Mariana."

It is difficult to read this poem slowly and intently enough if one is to experience to the full the living things and sights and sounds that by its words are charmed into the mind—the hushed solitude, the desolation. Take even, of all there is, but the "peering mouse" in the sixth stanza—his sharp nose sniffing the air beneath the small wooden arch of his dark-glimmering mousery, where miche and shriek and gambol his fellows behind the mouldering wainscot. Or stay for a moment looking down on the "marsh mosses" in the third stanza—of a green as lively as a fairy's mantle in the sunlight, gilding the waters of the blackened sluice. So piece by piece the words of the poem build up in the imagination this solitary house with its forsaken Mariana, whom Tennyson himself had seen in the dream conferred on him by another poet, Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure:

Isabella.Can this be so? did Angelo so leave her?

Duke.Left her in her teares, and dried not one of them with his comfort: swallowed his vowes whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonour: in few, bestowed on her her owne lamentation, which she yet weares for his sake: and he, a marble to her teares, is washed with them, but relents not.

Isabella.What a merit were it in death to take this poore maid from the world....

[332]. "Yes Tor."

Turn your back on Okehampton and break out due South into the wilds of Dartmoor, and there, "summering" together "beneath the empty skies," lie titanic Yes Tor and High Willes, rearing their bare vast shapes 700 yards into the air.

[333]. "To heare the Mandrake grone." (stanza 2)

Of the dangerous plant Mandrake ("its root in something the shape and appearance of a man") is concocted Mandragora, one of the "drowsy syrups." "The leaves and fruit be also dangerous, for they cause deadly sleep, and peevish drowsiness." The fruit is "of the bigness of a reasonable pippin, and as yellow as gold when it is thoroughly ripe": fair without, ashes within. It is said that the mandrake's screams, when it is dragged out of the ground, will send the hearer mad. So the gatherer should first seal his ears, then tie the plant to a dog's tail and hike him on to haul it out of its haunt! "Avicenna the Arabian physician asserts that a Jew at Metz had a mandragore with a human head, and the legs and body of a cock, which lived five weeks, and was fed on lavender and earthworms, and, when dead, was preserved in spirits." Even up to the nineteenth century dreaders or wishers of witchcraft were wont to carry these monstrous little Erdmannikens in bosom or pocket for an amulet or charm.

The "Basilisk," old books maintain, is a fabulous beast whose icy glare freezes the gazer, and is mortal. Approach her then with a mirror; and courage be your guide!

"Hemlock, Henbane, Adders-tongue." (line 10)

Hemlock is that tall, dim-spotted plant of a sad green colour, and of a scent "strong, heady and bad," which is "very cold and dangerous," especially when "digged in the dark."

Clammy henbane is woolly-leafed, with hollow dark-eyed flowers of a purple-veined dingy yellow. "It lusts to grow in rancid soil, To 'stil its deadly oil."

Moonwort is the meek-looking little flowering fern that has the power to break locks, and to make any horse that chances to tread upon it cast his shoes.

The livid-flowered, cherry like-fruited dwale, enoron, or nightshade is the most "daungerous" plant in England. While leopard's bane—though it bears a bright-yellow daisy-like flower, and witches are said to fear sun-colour—is venomous to animals.

I am uncertain of adder's tongue, for the fern of this name cures sore eyes; and cuckoo-pint which is also so called, is "a remedy for poison and the plague"!

Of these six insidious plants only one is openly mentioned by Shakespeare, and they appear to have few country names, unlike, for example, the purple orchis, "which has so many," says Nicholas Culpeper, "that they would fill a sheet of paper": long-purples, dead-men's fingers, crake-feet, giddy-gandy, neat-legs, geese and goslings, and gander-gooses, being a few choice specimens.

[334]. "The Raven."

Underneath an old oak tree

There was of swine a huge company,

That grunted as they crunched the mast:

For that was ripe, and fell full fast.

Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:

One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.

Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:

He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!

Blacker was he than blackest jet,

Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.

He picked up the acorn and buried it straight

By the side of a river both deep and great

Where then did the Raven go?

He went high and low,

Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.

Many Autumns, many Springs

Travelled he with wandering wings:

Many Summers, many Winters—

I can't tell half his adventures.

At length he came back, and with him a She,

And the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree,

They built them a nest in the topmost bough,

And young ones they had, and were happy enow.

But soon came a Woodman in leathern guise,

His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.

He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,

But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,

At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.

His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,

And their mother did die of a broken heart.

The boughs from the trunk the Woodman did sever;

And they floated it down on the course of the river.

They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,

And with this tree and others they made a good ship.

The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land

Such a storm there did rise as no ship could withstand.

It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush'd in fast:

Round and round flew the raven, and cawed to the blast.

He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls—

See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!

Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,

And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,

And he thanked him again and again for this treat:

They had taken his all, and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET!

S. T. Coleridge

"Seventeen or eighteen years ago," wrote Coleridge in 1817, "an artist of some celebrity was so pleased with this doggerel that he amused himself with the thought of making a Child's Picture Book of it; but he could not hit on a picture for the four lines beginning, 'Many Autumns, many Springs.' I suggested a Round-about with four seats, and the four seasons, as children, with Time for the shew-man."

[335]. "A thousand darling Imps." (stanza 19)

"Aeriel spirits," says Robert Burton, "are such as keep quarter most part in the air, cause many tempests, thunder, and lightnings, tear oaks, fire steeples, houses, strike men and beasts, make it rain stones, ... wool, frogs, etc., counterfeit armies in the air, strange noises, swords, etc."

Nothing vexed Linnet Sara more than to be asked if there were any such darling imps or spectres or ghosts or blackamoors in Thrae. All such to her were nothing but idle fiddle-faddle. But Reginald Scot, who wrote The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), had another kind of kitchen company when he was young.

" ... Our mothers maide," he says, of his childhood, "so terrified us with ... bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings, Incubus, Robin goodfellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hellwaine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we were afraid of our own shadowes: in so much as some never feare the divill, but in a dark night; ..."

There seems to be no mention here of the salamander—a creature at least as rarely seen by mortal eyes as the puckle or firedrake.

"When I was about five years old," says Benvenuto Cellini, "my father happened to be in a basement-chamber of our house, where they had been washing, and where a good fire of oak logs was still burning; he had a viol in his hand and was playing and singing alone beside the fire. The weather was very cold. Happening to look into the fire, he espied in the middle of the most burning flames a little creature like a lizard, which was sporting in the core of the intensest coals. Becoming aware of what the thing was, he had my sister and me called, and pointing it out to us children, gave me a great box on the ears, which caused me to cry with all my might. Then he pacified me by saying, 'My dear little boy, I am not striking you for anything that you have done, but only to make you remember that the lizard you see in the fire is a salamander, a creature which has never been seen before by any of whom we have credible information.' So saying he gave me some pieces of money, and kissed me."

"Bell and Whip and Horse's Tail" (stanza 22)

—such in old days was the Witch's vile punishment if she escaped drowning: to be whipped, tied to a horse's tail, and rung through the crowded streets.

"Agramie," I suppose, is agrimony, which, if worn by the wary, will enable the wearer to detect witches. Their eyes too will betray them, for there you will find no tiny image of yourself reflected as in the eyes of the honest. And if you would be rid of their company, pluck a sprig of scarlet pimpernel, and repeat this charm:

Herbe pimpernell, I have thee found

Growing upon Christ Jesus' ground:

The same guift the Lord Jesus gave unto thee,

When he shed his blood on the tree,

Arise up, pimpernell, and goe with me.

And God blesse me,

And all that shall wear thee. Amen.

"Say this fifteen dayes together, twice a day, morning earlye fasting, and in the evening full."

Indeed, at last, whatever the peril, a quiet heart and heaven's courage, are charm enough:

I say that we are wound

With mercy round and round

As if with air: ...

Gerald Manley Hopkins

[336]. "The Water Kelpy" (stanza 8)

is a fiend that haunts in rivers and desolate waters. It is of horse-shape, and the sound of its neighings is a boding of death to the traveller.

"Thus did the evil creatures often press me hard, but, as was meet, I served them well with my war-sword; they had no joyous fill by eating me, wicked destroyers, sitting round their feast nigh the bottom of the sea; but in the morning, wounded by the sword, slain by the dagger, they lay up along the sea-strand, so that they could never more hinder seafarers on their course in the deep channel.

Light came from the east, the bright beacon of the Lord; the waves were stilled, and I could descry the sea-headlands, those wind-swept walls."

Beowulf, translated by C. B. Tinker

"'And what is the sea?' asked Will.

'The sea!' cried the miller. 'Lord help us all, it is the greatest thing God made! That is where all the water in the world runs down into a great salt lake. There it lies, as flat as my hand and as innocent-like as a child; but they do say when the wind blows it gets up into water-mountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down great ships bigger than our mill, and makes such a roaring that you can hear it miles away upon the land. There are great fish in it five times bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on her head.'"

Robert Louis Stevenson

[341]. "The Wandering Spectre."

" ... The usewall Method for a curious Person to get a transient Sight of this otherwise invisible Crew of Subterraneans, ... is to put his left Foot under the Wizard's right Foot, and the Seer's Hand is put on the Inquirer's Head, who is to look over the Wizard's right Shoulder ... then will he see a Multitude of Wights, like furious hardie Men, flocking to him haistily from all Quarters, as thick as Atoms in the Air.... Thes thorow Fear strick him breathless and speechless."

So says "Mr. Robert Kirk, Minister at Aberfoill," in his Secret Commonwealth of 1691.

Of these invisible wights the womenkind "are said to Spin very fine, to Dy, to Tossue, and Embroyder, but whether only curious Cob-webs, impalpable Rainbows ... I leave to conjecture."

[343]. "And Clootie's waur nor a Woman was." (stanza 19)

A strip or patch of wild weedy uncropped ground (like the Sluggard's garden) that in England is called No Man's Land, the Scots country folk call Clootie's Croft (or Clootie's little field). They hand it over by name, as it were, to the Fiend, hoping that he may rest content with its harvest of nettle and bramble and burr, and not range elsewhere. It is an old belief that if, like Christian, the wayfarer meets Apollyon straddling across his path, he may have to withstand him not only with sword and staff, but with his wits. Just so, too, in old times, sovereign princes would test strangers with dark questions and riddles. In this ballad the Fiend disguised as a knight comes wooing at a Widow's door, in the next he is abroad on the high road. Jennifer and the wee boy kept up their hearts, their wits about them, their eyes open, and "had the last word"; which, says Mr. Sidgwick, is a mighty powerful charm against evil spirits—as against Witches are the herbs vervain, dill, basil, hyssop, periwinkle and rue. Iron, too; the cross, and running water.

Here is another such encounter from The White Wallet—packed with poems new and old. You can almost hear the voices of the two speakers standing together in the quiet and dust of the morning road:

Meet-on-the-road.

"Now, pray, where are you going, child?" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"To school, sir, to school, sir," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"What have you in your basket, child?" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"My dinner, sir, my dinner, sir," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"What have you for your dinner, child?" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"Some pudding, sir, some pudding, sir," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"Oh, then I pray, give me a share," said Meet-on-the-Road.

"I've little enough for myself, sir," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"What have you got that cloak on for?" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"To keep the wind and cold from me," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"I wish the wind would blow through you," said Meet-on-the-Road.

"Oh, what a wish! Oh, what a wish!" said Child-as-It-Stood.

"Pray what are those bells ringing for?" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"To ring bad spirits home again," said Child-as-It-Stood.

"Oh, then, I must be going, child!" said Meet-on-the-Road.

"So fare you well, so fare you well," said Child-as-It-Stood.

And here, for titbits and bonnes bouches, are Seven Ancient Riddles from Popular Rhymes—in case:

i.

The fiddler and his wife,

The piper and his mother,

Ate three half-cakes, three whole cakes,

And three quarters of another.

ii.

A house full, a yard full,

And ye can't catch a bowl full.

iii.

As I was going o'er London Bridge,

I heard something crack;

Not a man in all England

Can mend that!

iv.

I had a little sister,

They called her Pretty Peep;

She wades in the waters,

Deep, deep, deep!

She climbs up the mountains,

High, high, high;

My poor little sister,

She has but one eye.

v.

As I was going o'er yon moor of moss,

I met a man on a gray horse;

He whipp'd and he wail'd,

I ask'd him what he ail'd;

He said he was going to his father's funeral,

Who died seven years before he was born!

vi.

As I looked out o' my chamber window,

I heard something fall;

I sent my maid to pick it up,

But she couldn't pick it all.

vii.

Black within, and red without,

Four corners round about.

Answers.

i. 1¾ cakes each; since, if Mr. Piper marries, his wife will be Mr. and Mrs. Fiddler's dear daughter-in-law. ii. Smoke; iii. Ice; iv. A Star; v. The poor soul in the coffin was by trade a dyer; vi. Snuff (!); vii. A Chimney (in Days of Yore).

[344]. "The Fause Knicht."

Such visitants, it would appear, have marvellous power even over faces or shapes in stone:

He's tied his steed to the kirk-stile,

Syne wrang-gaites round the kirk gaed he;

When the Mer-Man entered the kirk-door,

Away the sma' images turned their e'e....

Wrang-gaites must mean widdershins, left to right, West to East, the opposite to deiseal (deshal)—to the right, Sunwards.

Here is another such visitor—one who considerately intrudes not all at once but little by little, bone by bone:

The Strange Visitor.

A wife was sitting at her reel ae night;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' braid braid soles, and sat down at the fireside;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' sma' legs, and sat down on the braid braid soles;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' muckle muckle knees, and sat down on the sma' sma' legs;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' sma' sma' thees, and sat down on the muckle muckle knees;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' muckle muckle hips, and sat down on the sma' sma' thees;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a sma' sma' waist, and sat down on the muckle muckle hips;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' braid braid shouthers, and sat down on the sma' sma' waist;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' sma' sma' arms, and sat down on the braid braid shouthers;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a pair o' muckle muckle hands, and sat down on the sma' sma' arms;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a sma' sma' neck, and sat down on the braid braid shouthers;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

In came a great big head, and sat down on the sma' sma' neck;

And aye she sat, and aye she reeled, and aye she wished for company.

"What way hae ye sic braid braid feet?" quo' the wife.

"Muckle ganging, muckle ganging."

"What way hae ye sic sma' sma' legs?"

"Aih-h-h!—late—and wee-e-e moul."

"What way hae ye sic muckle muckle knees?"

"Muckle praying, muckle praying."

"What way hae ye sic sma' sma' thees?"

"Aih-h-h!—late—and wee-e-e moul."

"What way hae ye sic big big hips?"

"Muckle sitting, muckle sitting."

"What way hae ye sic a sma' sma' waist?"

"Aih-h-h!—late—and wee-e-e moul."

"What way hae ye sic braid braid shouthers?"

"Wi' carrying broom, wi' carrying broom."

"What way hae ye sic sma' sma' arms?"

"Aih-h-h!—late—and wee-e-e moul."

"What way hae ye sic muckle muckle hands?"

"Threshing wi' an iron flail, threshing wi' an iron flail."

"What way hae ye sic a sma' sma' neck?"

"Aih-h-h!—late—and wee-e-e moul."

"What way hae ye sic a muckle muckle head?"

"Muckle wit, muckle wit."

"What do you come for?"

"For YOU!"

[345]. "Christabel."

I have included only these few stanzas of this familiar magical poem because a book is but one book, and to print everything as lovely or almost as lovely would need many.

In reading it, as Coleridge explained, all that is necessary to ensure its lilt and cadence is to remember that every line, however few or many its words or syllables, has four accents, and that these fall in accord with the meaning of the lines as one reads them with clear eyes, attentive ear, and understanding. In his tale of Genevieve there is yet another false and lovely Fiend:

... But when I told the cruel scorn

That crazed that bold and lovely Knight,

And that he crossed the mountain-woods,

Nor rested day nor night;

That sometimes from the savage den,

And sometimes from the darksome shade,

And sometimes starting up at once

In green and sunny glade,—

There came and looked him in the face

An angel beautiful and bright;

And that he knew it was a Fiend,

This miserable Knight——

"A Toothless Mastiff Bitch."

Here is a description of one with teeth—a dog seldom seen now. It is taken from a German book on husbandry, translated by Barnaby Goodge, and is quoted in Animal Lore:

"First the mastie that keepeth the house: for this purpose you must provide you such a one, as hath a large and a mightie body, a great and a shrill voyce, that both with his barking he may discover, and with his sight dismay the theefe, yea, being not seene, with the horror of his voice put him to flight; his stature must neither be long nor short, but well set, his head great, his eyes sharpe, and fiery, ... his countenance like a lion, his brest great and shaghayrd, his shoulders broad, his legges bigge, his tayle short, his feet very great; his disposition must neither be too gentle, nor too curst, that he neither fawne upon a theefe, nor flee (fly) upon his friends; very waking, no gadder abroad, not lavish of his mouth, barking without cause. Neither maketh it any matter though he be not swift: for he is but to fight at home, and to give warning of the enemie." And his name is little Bingo!

[347]. "Once a fair and stately Palace."

The radiant palace of this poem is indeed far away—the other side of dream and night. Its monstrous word, Porphyrogene, means a prince, a child-Royal, one born in the chamber of some Eastern palace walled with rare porphyry.

[350]. "Sweet Whispers are heard by the Traveller." (stanza 6)

On a poet's lips I slept

Dreaming like a love-adept

In the sound his breathing kept;

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,

Nor heed nor see, what things they be;

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurslings of immortality!...

Percy Bysshe Shelley

[352]. "My a Dildin."

This, 353, 355 and 356 are four more Singing-Game Rhymes, worn down into almost nonsensical jingle by multitudinous tongues in long long usage. (See No. 41, page 36).

And—since in my humble opinion it is not easy to get too much of this kind of good thing—here is another:

Bobby Shaft is gone to sea,

With silver buckles at his knee;

When he'll come home he'll marry me,

Pretty Bobby Shaft!

Bobby Shaft is fat and fair,

Combing down his yellow hair;

He's my love for evermair,

Pretty Bobby Shaft!

352a. "We are come to court."

King Edelbrode cam owre the sea,

Fa la lilly.

All for to marry a gay ladye,

Fa la lilly.

Her lilly hands, sae white and sma',

Fa la lilly.

Wi' gouden rings were buskit braw,

Fa la lilly....

And here is a Bride of Elizabeth's day whom I chanced on in that packed and inexhaustible book, Shakespeare's England. When "buskit braw," she must have been as lovely to see as a hawthorn in May or a wax candle in a silver shrine:

"The bride being attired in a gown of sheeps russet, and a kirtle of fine worsted, her head attired with a billiment of gold, and her hair as yellow as gold hanging down behind her, which was curiously combed and pleated, according to the manner in those days: she was led to church between two sweet boys, with bride-laces and rosemary tied about their silken sleeves.... Then was there a fair bride-cup of silver and gilt carried before her wherein was a goodly branch of rosemary, gilded very fair, hung about with silken ribands of all colours: next was there a noise of musicians, that played all the way before her: after her came all the chiefest maidens of the country, some bearing great bride-cakes, and some garlands of wheat, finely gilded, and so she passed to the Church."

As for the silken ribands they may have been of Drakes colour or Ladies blush or Gozelinge colour or Marigold or Isabel or Peas porridge tawny or Popingay blew or Lusty gallant, but they were certainly not Judas colour, Devil in the hedge, or Dead Spaniard.

[355]. "And feed Her wi' new Milk and Bread."

The Yellow-haired Laddie sat down on yon brae,

Cries—Milk the ewes, Lassie! let nane o' them gae!

And ay she milked, and ay she sang—

The Yellow-haired Laddie shall be my gudeman!

And ay she milked, and ay she sang—

The Yellow-haired Laddie shall be my gudeman!...

Allan Ramsay

[357]. Quoth John to Joan.

This old song, which was set to music in the reign of Henry VIII., comes (like Dallyaunce of No. 35), out of a Morality Play, Lusty Juventus, the author of which is said to be one "R. Wever," whose body has now for many a century been slumbering on in its cocoon.

[358]. Milk-White Fingers, Cherry Nose.

This is the only poem I have ever seen in which the midmost feature of a pretty face is compared to a cherry. And yet a frosty morning must have given many a dainty nose that fair bright coral colour.

So too, Bob Cherry, in these lines To His Lady:

Black-heart were mine to love not thy

White-heart so sweet and tender;

Be kind, my dear, for—Summer by—

What fruits hath cold December?

[359]. "Or the Bees their careful King."

In old times the "Governor" of a Bee Hive was sometimes referred to as the King and sometimes as the Queen. The choice depended in part on which kind of monarch was on the throne. There is an entrancing story of the middle ages, told by Mr. Tickner Edwardes in his book on the Honey Bee.

"A certaine simple woman, on finding that her bees were storing little honey for her and were perishing of "the murraine," stole one of the holy wafers from the priest, and for miraculous remedy concealed it in one of her hives. "Whereupon the Murraine ceased and the Honie abounded. The Woman, therefore lifting up the hive at the due time to take out the Honie, saw there (most strange to be seene) a Chappell built by the Bees, with an altar to it, the wals adorned by marvellous skill of architecture, with windowes conveniently set in their places: also a doore and a steeple with bells. And the Host being laid upon the altar, the Bees making a sweet noise, flew around it." Apart from "the singing masons building roofs of gold," the gluttonous drones, the sentries, wax-makers, bread-kneaders, nurses, etc., there are the Queen's Ladies-in-waiting. "For difference from the rest they beare for their crest a tuft or tossell, in some coloured yellow, in some murrey, in manner of a plume; whereof some turne downward like an Ostrich-feather, others stand upright like a Hern-top." But for truths even stranger than fantasy regarding bees and their kind, go to Henri Fabre.

[360]. "And here, and here."

As Flora slept and I lay waking,

I smiled to see a bird's mistaking,

For from a bough it down did skip

And for a cherry pecked her lip....

[362]. "My Heart is gladder than all these."

How many times do I love thee, dear?

Tell me how many thoughts there be

In the atmosphere

Of the new fall'n year,

Whose white and sable hours appear

The latest flake of eternity:

So times do I love thee, dear!

How many times do I love again?

Tell me how many beads there are

In a silver chain

Of evening rain

Unravelled from the tumbling main,

And threading the eye of a yellow star:

So many times do I love again!

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

[363].

The word screen (line 4) means, I think, "Hide and shelter those smiles away that in their beauty seem to burn in the air": for all beauty resembles radiance in its influence on the mind. And this recalls to memory Southwell's poem, The Burning Babe, No. 256.

[364]. "A Sonnet of the Moon."

The closer one looks at and examines a fine sonnet—its way of rhyming, its rise, poise, flight and fall, the ease and exactitude with which what is said in it fills its mould or form—the more, I was going to say, one should hesitate before attempting to write another. This particular sonnet (like No. 361), is of the English or Shakespearean kind, and is so lovely a thing that only a close attention would notice the carelessness of its rhymes. No. 342 is an example of the form which our sixteenth century poets borrowed from Italy. Comparison of them shows that, as with the old Chinese ginger jars, so in poetry: not only is the syrup delightful, but even the pot may be interesting.

Coleridge wrote few sonnets, and this is his explanation of the length one must be: "It is confined to fourteen lines, because as some particular number is necessary, and that particular number must be a small one, it may as well be fourteen as any other number. When no reason can be adduced against a thing, Custom is a sufficient reason for it."

When I read this last remark for the first time it was as if my mind had been startled into attention as one's body is when it collides with a stranger in the street. There is a wide wisdom in it. How many natural, human and delightful things there are in this world indeed for which Custom is a sufficient reason: Children, for instance, daisies in the grass, skylarks in the clouds, dreams in sleep, rhymes, gay clothes, friendship, laughter.

"The Pale Queen."

There is the apparition of a lovely face in the Moon—proud and mute—to be discovered by careful eyes usually on the extreme right of the disc, her own eyes gazing towards the left.

[368]. "It was in and about the Martinmas time."

This old Scottish song was a favourite of Oliver Goldsmith's in his childhood. "The music of the finest singer," he said, "is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night, or The Cruelty of Barbara Allen.

As with the Scottish ballads so with this last poem—it is the brevity and bareness with which the story is told and is not told that sets it apart. Without one express word to prove it so, we know that Sir John had always loved the proud Barbara even though he had spoken lightly of her, and that she too had always loved him, though she refuses the word that would have saved his life.

[371]. "I Never Had but One True Love, in Cold Grave She was Lain."

Yet another tragic and sorrowful poem of which, to some fancies, there may be too many in this book already. Well, here is the story of the beautiful Princess Uillanita: She cared only for flowers white and colourless as dew in the first light of day, or as laundered linen blanching on a hedge of thorn. And she came one still evening, when she was in search of what she could not find, to a valley wherein a forest gloomed above a deep but placid river. Within the forest, refreshed by the mists of the river, grew none but flowers blue and dark and purple, and such was the young Princess's hatred of them that she covered her eyes with her hands, fled on, and so lost her way.

In the middle of the night and long after she had wept herself to sleep, the wailing of a nocturnal bird pierced into her dreams, and she woke to find one solitary star of the colourlessness of Vega shining alone in radiance in the space of sky betwixt the branches above her head. Its thin ray silvered down—spearlike in its straightness—and of a beam easily sufficing to irradiate a tiny clustering flower which stood scarcely visible in the moss at her hand's side, and was drenching the air with its fragrance. It was a flower utterly strange to her, whiter than hoarfrost, fairer than foam.

The enravished Princess gazed spellbound. "Why," whispered she to herself, in the quiet of the dark gigantic forest; "if I had not wept at the flowers of this sombre forest, if I had not lost my way, if I had not been moved in my sleep to awaken, I never should have seen this crystal thing; that is lovelier than I deemed Paradise itself could bring to bloom." And she kissed the thin-spun petals, and happily fell again asleep.

[372]. "A Lament."

Only two stanzas out of six, and these, maybe, a little difficult in the old Scots:

Depart, depart, depart!

Alas! I must depart

From her that has my heart

With heart full sore;

Against my will indeed

And can find no remede—

I wait the pains of death—

Can do no more....

Adieu mine own sweet thing,

My joy and comforting,

My mirth and solacing

Of earthly gloir:

Farewell, my lady bright,

And my remembrance right,

Farewell, and have good night—

I say no more.

[380]. To Helen.

Who "the wayworn wanderer" is, I am uncertain; but apart from its rare music, how long a journey awaits the imagination in this poem, and how closely inwoven is its thought. Yet it is said to have been written when Poe was in his early 'teens.

[381]. "There is a Lady."

Mr. Nahum's picture for this poem was of a little winged boy at evening, his quiver of arrows on his back, his bow the perch of a nightingale, and himself lying fast asleep under a hawthorn bush in full flower—a narrow green sun-dappled river near-by, rosy clouds and birds in the air, and strange snow-peaked hills afar.

"Till I die."

... Only our love hath no decay;

This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;

Running it never runs from us away,

But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

John Donne

[383]. "It is not so."

Silly boy 'tis ful Moon yet, thy night as day shines clearely.

Had thy youth but wit to feare, thou couldst not love so dearely.

Shortly wilt thou mourne when all thy pleasures are bereavèd;

Little knows he how to love that never was deceivèd....

Yet be just and constant still! Love may beget a wonder,

Not unlike a Summer's frost, or Winter's fatall thunder.

He that holds his Sweethart true, unto his day of dying,

Lives, of all that ever breathed, most worthy the envỳing.

Thomas Campion

[385].

In this poem, as in all Christina Rossetti's work, there is a rhythm and poise, a serpentining of music, so delicate that on clumsy lips it will vanish as rapidly as the bloom from a plum. Indeed, each stanza is like a branch (with its twigs) of a wild damson-tree, its wavering line broken and beautified with bud, flower and leaf. And certainly as fresh an air, and as clear a light, stirs and dwells in the poem as on the tree itself in April.

[387].

This is from Part II., Act II., Scene i. of "Zapolya." Glycine sings unseen in a cavern—her voice comforting her lover wandering forlorn by night "in a savage wood."

[389].

For I'll cut my green coat a foot above my knee,

And I'll clip my yellow locks an inch below mine ee.

Hey, nonny, nonny, nonny.

I'll buy me a white cut, forth for to ride,

And I'll go seek him through the world that is so wide.

Hey, nonny, nonny, nonny.

[391]. "Chimborazo, Cotopaxi."

In medieval days it seems that a traveller here and there, happily supposing the world to be a floating island of indiscoverable dimensions, hung in the wilds of space, and not knowing that it was merely an "oblate spheroid," would journey clean round it and so come back, to his amazement, to the place from which he started. Here is such an experience from Sir John Mandeville, in his own words: "It was told that a certain worthy man departed some time from our Country for to go search the World.... He passed India and the Isles beyond it, where are more than 5000 Isles, and so long and for so many seasons he went by Sea and Land, and so environed the World, that he came at last to an Isle whereon he heard spoken his own language—a calling of oxen in the Plough—such Words in fact as men were wont to speak to Beasts in his own country. Whereof he greatly marvelled, knowing not how that might be." For there—as if it were a ghost or spectre—there was the chimney of his own house smoking up into the clear morning air! And what did he do, maybe? He stared; he sighed; he grew pale; he shuddered: and—he turned back!

[392]. "Hallo my fancy."

For the first sight of this poem I most gratefully thank my friend Mr. Ivor Gurney, though no doubt it was in Mr. Nahum's Book somewhere, and I was too indolent at the time to copy it out. The poem was written by William Cleland while he was still at St. Andrews. All else I know of him is that he was born about 1661, and fell at Dunkeld in 1689. There is nothing in English to my knowledge that resembles it. Erra Pater (stanza 4) was the name given to a busy astrologer and almanac-concocter, William Lilly, of the time. King Phalaris's monstrous bull was of brass: he perished in it.

By "the tapers" (stanza 2) is meant, I fancy, those phosphor-like fires that gather on the yard-arms of ships at sea when the air is electric with tempest. Sir Humphrey Gilbert's sailors were fearful at sight of this apparition, and of a monster, too, that appeared swimming in the waves beside their frigate, the Squirrel, a little before she and her riding lights disappeared for ever.

" ... Men which all their life time had occupied the Sea, never saw more outragious Seas. We had also upon our maine yard, an apparition of a little fire by night, which seamen doe call Castor and Pollux. But we had onely one, which they take an evill signe of more tempest.... The same Monday night, about twelve of the clocke ... suddenly her lights were out ... and withall our watch cryed, the Generall was cast away, which was too true. For in that moment, the Frigat was devoured and swallowed up of the Sea ..."

As for Cupid (stanza 5), he is said to be the slyest archer that ever shot arrow—and a dangerous child either to entertain (as the poem proves that begins as follows):

Cupid abroade was 'lated in the night,

His wings were wet with ranging in the raine;

Harbour he sought, to mee hee took his flight,

To dry his plumes I heard the boy complaine.

I opte the doore and graunted his desire,

I rose my selfe, and made the wagge a fire....

or—as yet another poem shows—to take as a scholar:

I dreamt by me I saw fair Venus stand,

Holding young Cupid in her lovely hand,

And said, kind Shepherd, I a scholar bring

My little son, to learn of you to sing....

And last, the pelican (in stanza 7). She was supposed in old days to be "the lovingest bird that is," since at need she would pierce her breast with her bill to feed her young ones. The plaintive singing of the dying swan I have never heard, except in Tennyson's words:

The plain was grassy, wild and bare,

Wide, wild, and open to the air,

Which had built up everywhere

An under-roof of doleful gray.

With an inner voice the river ran,

Adown it floated a dying swan,

And loudly did lament.

It was the middle of the day.

Ever the weary wind went on,

And took the reed-tops as it went....

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,

And white against the cold-white sky,

Shone out their crowning snows.

One willow over the river wept,

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;

Above in the wind was the swallow,

Chasing itself at its own wild will,

And far thro' the marish green and still

The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

Hearke canst thou heare me? I will play the Swan,

And dye in Musicke: Willough, Willough, Willough....

Othello

[393]. "Columbus's doom-burdened caravels." (line 13)

" ... The next day, Thursday, October 11, 1492, was destined to be for ever memorable in the history of the world.... The people on the Santa Maria saw some petrels and a green branch in the water; the Pinta saw a reed and two small sticks carved with iron, and one or two other pieces of reeds and grasses that had been grown on shore, as well as a small board. Most wonderful of all, the people of the Nina saw 'a little branch full of dog roses';.... The day drew to its close; and after nightfall, according to their custom, the crews of the ships repeated the Salve Regina. Afterwards the Admiral addressed the people and sailors of his ship, 'very merry and pleasant,'.... The moon was in its third quarter, and did not rise until eleven o'clock. The first part of the night was dark, and there was only a faint starlight into which the anxious eyes of the look-out men peered from the forecastles of the three ships. At ten o'clock Columbus was walking on the poop of his vessel, when he suddenly saw a light right ahead. The light seemed to rise and fall as though it were a candle or a lantern held in some one's hand and waved up and down. The Admiral called Pedro Gutierrez to him and asked him whether he saw anything; and he also saw the light. Then he sent for Rodrigo Sanchez and asked him if he saw the light; but he did not.... Dawn came at last, flooding the sky with lemon and saffron and scarlet and orange, until at last the pure gold of the sun glittered on the water. And when it rose it showed the sea-weary mariners an island lying in the blue sea ahead of them: the island of Guanahani; San Salvador....

Christopher Columbus, Filson Young

[395]. "To Sea, to Sea."

... 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 jocund 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 cedared alleys fling

Nard and Cassia's balmy smells....

But now my task is smoothly done,

I can fly, or I can run,

Quickly to the green earth's end,

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 sphery chime;

Or if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her.

John Milton

Master.Steersman, how stands the wind?

Steersman.Full north-north-east.

Master.What course?

Steersman.Full south-south-west.

Master.No worse, and blow so fair,

Then sink despair,

Come solace to the mind!

Ere night, we shall the haven find.

John Dowland

"Caved Tritons' azure Day" (line 12)

—Dark-fated Clarence in King Richard III. dreamt of that "azure day":

... As we paced along

Upon the giddy footing of the Hatches,

Me thought that Glouster stumbled, and in falling

Strooke me (that thought to stay him) over-board,

Into the tumbling billowes of the maine.

O Lord, methought what paine it was to drowne,

What dreadfull noise of water in mine eares,

What sightes of ugly death within mine eyes....

Methought I saw a thousand fearfull wrackes:

A thousand men that Fishes gnawed upon:

Wedges of Gold, great Anchors, heapes of Pearle,

Inestimable Stones, unvalewed Jewels,

All scattered in the bottome of the Sea.

Some lay in dead-men's Sculles; and in the holes

Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,

(As 'twere in scorne of eyes) reflecting Gemmes,

That wooed the slimy bottome of the deepe,

And mocked the dead bones that lay scattred by....

[396]. "Jewels more rich than Ormus shows." (line 20)

Mr. Nahum's picture to this was of a man clothed in rags that must once have been rich and pompous. He sits, in the picture, gnawing his nails upon a heap of what appears to be precious stones and lumps of gold. All around him stretch the sands of the seashore, and there is a little harbour with a decayed quay, its river-mouth silted up with ooze and flotsam, so that nothing but a row-boat could find entrance there. An immense sun burns in the sky; and, though a thread of fresh water flows nearby, the man among the jewels seems to be tormented with thirst. For Ormus, or Hormuz, on its narrow island of wild-coloured rocks, date-palms, parrots and many birds, was once the rich mart and treasure-house between Persia and India—spices, pearls, ivory, gold, precious stones, and, in particular, the diamond, being its merchandise. In 1507 the Portuguese Conqueror Alfonso Albuquerque stole it from its dark princes. In 1622 Shah Abbas the Great razed it to the ground. To-day it is but a waste, inhabited by a few fishermen and diggers, its only commodities—that once were gems—salt and sulphur; while still in the height of its Summer blows Julot, Harmatan, Il Sirocco, the Flame-Wind, so deadly in its breath that the troops of an army of 1600 horsemen and 6000 foot, says Marco Polo, marching to punish the city for neglecting to pay tribute to the King of Kîrman, and camping overnight without its walls, were baked next noon as dry as pumice, and not a voice among them to tell the tale, though their bodily shape and colour seemed to appearance unchanged. To protect themselves against this Julot, the citizens of Ormus would build huts of sheltering osier-work over the water, and in the heat of the morning would stand immersed in its coolness up to the chin.

"Apples" (line 23)

—these are pineapples, the "price" of the next line meaning excellence. "Ambergris" (line 28), is a rare and costly stuff which, as its name tells, resembles grey amber. It has a wondrously sweet smell, was once used in cooking, and is disgorged by the whale that supplies the world with the comforting ointment of childhood called Spermaceti.

In Shakespeare's day, Marvell's "remote Bermudas" were known as the "Isle of Divels"—because of the nocturnal yellings, cries and yelpings that were reported to haunt them. English sailors, wrecked and cast away on Great Bermuda in 1709, however, brought home in their boats of cedar-wood the news that this wild music was caused (at least in part) by descendants of the hogs that had been left there by the long-gone Spaniard, Juan Bermudez and his men! They told, too, that it was an island fair and commodious, of a gentle climate, and a sweet-smelling air; and Shakespeare almost certainly had its enchantments in mind when he wrote of Ariel, Caliban and Miranda. Was not Ariel in Prospero's more solitary days called up at midnight "to fetch dewe from the still-vext Bermoothes"?

To the Puritan voyagers of Andrew Marvell's poem the Islands were as welcome and angelic as the Hesperides. And no poet could better tell of them than he. For in Marvell's verse dwells a curious happiness, like sunshine on a pool of water-lilies. Yet he, too, like other dreamers, was a man of affairs, and of endless industry and zeal. He was thrice Member of Parliament for his birthplace, Kingston-on-Hull, and, with Milton, was one of Oliver Cromwell's Latin Secretaries. John Aubrey describes him as "of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish face, cherry-cheek't, hazell eie, brown hair. He was in his conversation very modest, and of very few words. And though he loved wine, he would never drink heartilie in company, and was wont to say, that, he would not play the good fellow in any man's company in whose hands he would not trust his life.... He lies interred under the pewes in the south side of St. Giles' church-in-the-fields, under the window wherein is painted in glass a red lyon...." And there George Chapman, William Shirley, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury share his rest.

[397]. "That talkative bald-headed Seaman came." (line 23)

"... And now my name; which way shall lead to all

My miseries after, that their sounds may fall

Through your ears also, and shew (having fled

So much affliction) first, who rests his head

In your embraces, when, so far from home,

I knew not where t' obtain it resting room:

I am Ulysses Laertiades,

The fear of all the world...."

The Odysseys, George Chapman

[398].

The prose "argument" to the "Ancient Mariner," which is almost as rare a piece of reading as the Rime itself, has been omitted. But here is a fragment of it relating to the passage on pages 390-4: "...The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him; but the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance. He despiseth the creatures of the calm, and envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead. But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men. In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

"By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm—their beauty and their happiness. He blesseth them in his heart. The spell begins to break. By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain. He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element. The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired and inspirited, and the ship moves on; but not by the souls of the men, nor by dæmons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint...."

"Daemons of earth or middle air" have been told of also by land travellers—by Friar Odoric, for example, in the account of his journey through Cathay during the years 1316-1330:

"Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights, I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles long; and if any unbeliever enter therein he quitteth it never again, but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the cross, and began continually to repeat VERBUM CARO FACTUM, but I dared not at all to come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it. And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I ascended a hill of sand and looked around me. But nothing could I descry, only I still heard those nakers to play which were played so marvellously. And when I got to the top of that hill I found there a great quantity of silver heaped up as it had been fishes' scales, and some of this I put into my bosom. But as I cared nought for it, and was at the same time in fear lest it should be a snare to hinder my escape, I cast it all down again to the ground. And so by God's grace I came forth scathless. Then all the Saracens, when they heard of this, showed me great worship, saying that I was a baptised and holy man. But those who had perished in that valley they said belonged to the devil."

As an Arab journeyeth

Through a sand of Ayaman,

Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue,

Lagging by his side along;

And a rusty wingèd Death

Grating its low flight before,

Casting ribbèd shadows o'er

The blank desert, blank and tan:

He lifts by hap to'rd where the morning's roots are

His weary stare,—

Sees, although they plashless mutes are,

Set in a silver air

Fountains of gelid shoots are,

Making the daylight fairest fair;

Sees the palm and tamarind

Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind;—

A sight like innocence when one has sinned

A green and maiden freshness smiling there,

While with unblinking glare

The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her....

The Mirage, Francis Thompson

Thou to me art such a spring

As the Arab seeks at eve,

Thirsty from the shining sands;

There to bathe his face and hands,

While the sun is taking leave,

And dewy sleep is a delicious thing.

Thou to me art such a dream

As he dreams upon the grass,

While the bubbling coolness near

Makes sweet music in his ear;

And the stars that slowly pass

In solitary grandeur o'er him gleam.

Thou to me art such a dawn

As the dawn whose ruddy kiss

Wakes him to his darling steed;

And again the desert speed,

And again the desert bliss,

Lightens thro' his veins, and he is gone!

George Meredith

[399]. "He Told of Waves." (line 28)

So, too, does the Ship's Captain in yet such another ore-loaden poem of the marvellous, "The Sale of St. Thomas," by Lascelles Abercrombie, telling how the saint in terror of the unknown would turn back from his mission, is rebuked by his Master, and sold by him for twenty pieces of silver to the Captain of a slant-sailed vessel bound for the barbarous Indies. Here is but a fragment of the poem:

"... A Ship's Captain.You are my man, my passenger?

Thomas.I am.

I go to India with you.

Captain.Well, I hope so.

There's threatening in the weather. Have you a mind

To hug your belly to the slanted deck,

Like a louse on a whip-top, when the boat

Spins on an axle in the hissing gales?

Thomas.Fear not. 'Tis likely indeed that storms are now

Plotting against our voyage; ay, no doubt

The very bottom of the sea prepares

To stand up mountainous or reach a limb

Out of his night of water and huge shingles,

That he and the waves may break our keel. Fear not;

Like those who manage horses, I've a word

Will fasten up within their evil natures

The meanings of the winds and waves and reefs.

Captain.You have a talisman? I have one too;

I know not if the storms think much of it.

I may be shark's meat yet. And would your spell

Be daunting to a cuttle, think you now?

We had a bout with one on our way here;

It had green lidless eyes like lanterns, arms

As many as the branches of a tree,

But limber, and each one of them wise as a snake.

It laid hold of our bulwarks, and with three

Long knowing arms, slimy, and of a flesh

So tough they'ld fool a hatchet, searcht the ship,

And stole out of the midst of us all a man;

Yes, and he the proudest man upon the seas

For the rare powerful talisman he'd got.

And would yours have done better?

Thomas.I am one

Not easily frightened. I'm for India...."

[400]. "Parrots of Shrilly Green"

—this gaudy and longevous bird, that seems to contain all the wisdom of Solomon and more than the craft of Cleopatra in his eye, perched first upon England many centuries ago. Skelton speaks of him:

My name is parrot, a bird of Paradise ...

With my becke bent, my little wanton eye,

My fethers fresh, as is the emrawde grene,

About my neck a circulet, lyke the ryche rubye,

My little legges, my fete both nete and cleane....

And so, too, John Maplet, a "naturalist" who in 1567 wrote A Greene Forest:

"The Parret hath all hir whole bodie greene, saving that onely about hir necke she hath a Coller or Chaine naturally wrought like to Sinople or Vermelon. Indie hath of this kinde such as will counterfaite redily a mans speach: what wordes they heare, those commonly they pronounce. There have bene found of these that have saluted Emperours...."

But which Emperors, and when and to what end he does not relate. A parrot of price indeed would be she that had held converse with "Ozymandias, king of kings."

[402]. "The March of Time." (line 2)

Say, is there aught that can convey

An image of its transient stay?

'Tis an hand's breadth; 'tis a tale;

'Tis a vessel under sail:

'Tis a courser's straining steed;

'Tis a shuttle in its speed;

'Tis an eagle in its way,

Darting down upon its prey;

'Tis an arrow in its flight,

Mocking the pursuing sight;

'Tis a vapour in the air;

'Tis a whirlwind rushing there;

'Tis a short-lived fading flower;

'Tis a rainbow on a shower;

'Tis a momentary ray

Smiling in a winter's day;

'Tis a torrent's rapid stream;

'Tis a shadow; 'tis a dream;

'Tis the closing watch of night,

Dying at approaching light;

'Tis a landscape vainly gay,

Painted upon crumbling clay;

'Tis a lamp that wastes its fires,

'Tis a smoke that quick expires;

'Tis a bubble,'tis a sigh:

Be prepared, O Man! to die.

They are like strings of precious stones, rosaries, these Tudor laments, one image following another, and however sad in colour, all making beauty:

As withereth the primrose by the river,

As fadeth summer's sun from gliding fountains,

As vanisheth the light-blown bubble ever,

As melteth snow upon the mossy mountains:

So melts, so vanisheth, so fades, so withers,

The rose, the shine, the bubble, and the snow,

Of praise, pomp, glory, joy, which short life gathers,

Fair praise, vain pomp, sweet glory, brittle joy.

The withered primrose by the mourning river,

The faded summer's sun from weeping fountains,

The light-blown bubble vanishèd for ever,

The molten snow upon the naked mountains,

Are emblems that the treasures we uplay,

Soon wither, vanish, fade, and melt away....

[403]. "The Wild Hyaena." (line 11)

In old times it was believed that if a hungry hyaena or jaccatray—who cannot wry his neck "because his backbone stretches itself out to the head"—dreams, he dreams so vividly that he calls into his sleeping brain a vision of the beasts he covets for prey. And this vision is so lifelike that he howls out of his sleep in mockery of the beasts—and thus decoys them to his den! He is a nocturnal scavenger, haunting graveyards, and "when" says Lyly, he "speaketh lyke a man," he "deviseth most mischief."

[404]. "In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan."

"Now, this lord (the Great Caan)," says Friar Odoric in his Cathay, "passeth the summer at a certain place which is called SANDU, situated towards the north, and the coolest habitation in the world. But in the winter season he abideth in Cambalech. And when he will ride from the one place to the other this is the order thereof. He hath four armies of horsemen, one of which goeth a day's march in front of him, one at each side, and one a day's march in rear, so that he goeth always as it were, in the middle of a cross. And marching thus, each army hath its route laid down for it day by day, and findeth at its halts all necessary provender. But his own immediate company hath its order of march thus. The king travelleth in a two-wheeled carriage, in which is formed a very goodly chamber, all of lign-aloes and gold, and covered over with great and fine skins, and set with many precious stones. And the carriage is drawn by four elephants, well broken in and harnessed, and also by four splendid horses, richly caparisoned. And alongside go four barons, who are called CUTHE, keeping watch and ward over the chariot that no hurt come to the king. Moreover, he carrieth with him in his chariot twelve gerfalcons; so that even as he sits therein upon his chair of state or other seat, if he sees any birds pass he lets fly his hawks at them. And none may dare to approach within a stone's throw of the carriage, unless those whose duty brings them there. And thus it is that the king travelleth."

"A Sunless Sea."

Our English eyes, loving light, weary a little of the short cold days in our country, when the sun makes "winter arches." Sadder still would be our state in the regions told of by Marco Polo in the following passage:

"Beyond the most distant part of the territory of the Tartars, ... there is another region [thick set with dark impenetrable woods] which extends to the utmost bounds of the north, and is called the Region of Darkness, because during most part of the winter months the sun is invisible, and the atmosphere is obscured to the same degree as that in which we find it just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see. The men of this country are well made and tall, but of a very pallid complexion. They are not united under the government of a king or prince, and they live without any established laws or usages, in the manner of the brute creation. Their intellects also are dull, and they have an air of stupidity. The Tartars often proceed on plundering expeditions against these people, to rob them of their cattle and goods. For this purpose they avail themselves of those months in which the darkness prevails, in order that their approach may be unobserved; but, being unable to ascertain the direction in which they should return homeward with their booty, they provide against the chance of going astray by riding mares that have young foals at the time, which latter they suffer to accompany the dams as far as the confines of their own territory, but leave them, under proper care, at the commencement of the gloomy region. When their works of darkness have been accomplished, and they are desirous of revisiting the region of light, they lay the bridles on the necks of their mares, and suffer them freely to take their own course. Guided by maternal instinct, they make their way directly to the spot where they had quitted their foals; and by these means the riders are enabled to regain in safety the places of their residence."

[406]. "One held a Shell unto his Shell-like Ear." (line 6)

... Gather a shell from the strown beach

And listen at its lips: they sigh

The same desire and mystery,

The echo of the whole sea's speech.

And all mankind is thus at heart

Not anything but what thou art:

And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

[407]. "Like Solemn Apparitions Lulled Sublime To Everlasting Rest." (line 11)

... In the caves of the deep—lost Youth! lost Youth!—

O'er and o'er, fleeting billows! fleeting billows!—

Rung to his restless everlasting sleep

By the heavy death-bells of the deep,

Under the slimy-drooping sea-green willows,

Poor Youth! lost Youth!

Laying his dolorous head, forsooth,

On Carian reefs uncouth—

Poor Youth!

On the wild sand's ever-shifting pillows!...

O could my Spirit wing

Hills over, where salt Ocean hath his fresh headspring

And snowy curls bedeck the Blue-haired King,

Up where sweet oral birds articulate sing

Within the desert ring—

Their mighty shadows o'er broad Earth the Lunar

Mountains fling,

Where the Sun's chariot bathes in Ocean's fresh headspring—

O could my Spirit wing!...

George Darley

Full fathom five thy Father lies,

Of his bones are Corrall made:

Those are Pearles that were his eies,

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a Sea-change

Into something rich, and strange:

Sea-Nimphs hourly ring his knell—

Ding dong.

Harke now I heare them, ding-dong bell.

William Shakespeare

[411]. "The Golden Vanity."

This is a patchwork of stanzas from three versions of the old ballad. In one version the "Golden Vanity" is said to be the " Sweet Trinity," and to have been built by Sir Walter Raleigh in the Netherlands. According to yet another, the Cabin-boy, after threatening to sink the "Goulden Vanitie" as he had "sunk the French gallee," is taken on board and the Captain and merchant adventurers proved "far better than their word." But if stanza 12 is any witness, this seems unlikely. Can one not actually see the cold faces mocking down upon the water?

[412].

To an eye and ear new to them, these old Scottish ballads may seem a little difficult and forbidding. But read on, and their enchantment has no match—the very strangeness of the words, the rare music, the colour and light and clearness and vehemence, and, besides these, a wildness and ancientness like that of an old folk-tune which seems to carry with its burden as many lost memories as an old churchyard has gravestones. The stories they tell are world wide. How they came into that world (for of some of them there are as many as twenty to thirty different versions), how they have fared in their long journey, and even when and by whom they were made, are still questions on which even scholars are not yet agreed.

"Kevels" in line 5 of "Brown Robyn," means lots, and recalls a far older story:

"Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.... And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.... Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous. And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm upon you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.... So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her raging."

[415]. "A Seal My Father Was."

Notes of music for the enticement of seals, with other beautiful old Gaelic airs and poems and tales, will be found in Journals 23/5 of The Folk-Song Society, collected by Mr. Martin Freeman.

[418]. "Sir Patrick Spence."

The longer version of the ballad into which the genius of Sir Walter Scott wove a few new stanzas is the better known. But this, I think, is the best. Indeed, the secret art of this naked and lovely poetry seems nowadays to be lost: its marvel is how much it tells by means of the little it says.

"Late, Late Yestreen." (stanza 7)

With money in his pocket and bewaring of glass, the Man of Superstitions bows low and seven times to the new moon. If he sees a dim cindrous light filling in the circle of which this crescent is the edge, he "looks out for squalls"—the new moon has "the auld moone in hir arme." That light is the earth-shine. The sun illumines the earth; the earth like a looking-glass reflects his radiance upon the moon; and she thus melancholily returns it; whereas the silver blaze on her eastern edge is light direct: eyes looking upward thence into her black skies are lit with her prodigious mornings.

[419]. "Allison Gross."

Here I have changed only two words of the original.

[420]. "Sir Hugh."

If this ballad tells of a fact, then the young Sir Hugh was beguiled out of his life by the dark beautiful Jewess in the year 1255. The story comes from a monastery, and it is historically certain that the wealthiest Jews of Lincoln were in this year crucified on this charge. True or false, what a clear, pellucid picture the ballad builds up in the imagination—the ancient town; the boys at their game; the narrow, gabled, cobbled streets; the evening gold on roof and wall; night; lamentation; and the clanging of the bells.

[421]. "Edward."

The spelling of this ballad usually begins "Why dois your brand sae dripp wie bluid," and so on. This spelling Professor Child thought "affectedly antique." But since, as he says, mere antiquated "spelling will not make an old ballad, so it will not unmake one." And "Edward" in any guise is "one of the noblest" of the popular ballads. Here it is, then, in our own spelling for proof.

[422]. "I will sing."

The king in the third line is James the Sixth of Scotland and the First of England—the king, according to the old waggery, "who never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one." But see Green. The "wanton laird of young Logie" is John Wemyss who plotted against him with the Earl of Bothwell in 1592. His bold, crafty and merry young wife, May Margaret, says Mr. Sidgwick, had one of these four delectable maiden names—Vinstar, Weiksterne, Twynstoun, or Twinslace. It is dubious which.

All ladies in those old days carried knives at their girdles. The one in stanza 8 was clearly a wedding gift. And to judge from the ballads, doughty uses they sometimes put them to.

[423]. "Fair Annie."

In the margins of Mr. Nahum's copy of this ballad, two exquisite damosels were painted in green, blue and amethyst on gold (as in a monk's work), and between their fingers hung a linen napkin seemingly broidered with pearls and in the midst of it a sleeping dove. Whatever he may have meant by this, I confess that at first reading I fell in love with both these ladies. My feelings for the "noble knight" who ransomed fair Annie, then wearied of her, were different. It was strange to find a noble knight so hard a gentleman, not so much because he wearied of her (since to weary of one so true, intelligent and tender was even more of a punishment than a misfortune) but most particularly, with regard to his craving for "gowd and gear." He reminds me of a similar piece of humanity described in three short stanzas which were found by Mr. Macmath written on the fly-leaf of a little volume printed at Edinburgh about 1670, and which I found in Child's Ballads:

"He steps full statly on the street,

He hads the charters of him sell,

In to his cloathing he is complete,

In Craford's mure he bears the bell....

"I wish I had died my own fair death,

In tender age, when I was young;

I would never [then] have broke my heart

For the love of any churl's son.

"Wo be to my parents all,

That lives so farr beyond the sea!

I might have lived a noble life,

And wedded in my own countrée."

[425]. "But think na' ye my Heart was sair?" (line 21)

Down in yon garden sweet and gay

Where bonnie grows the lily,

I heard a fair maid sighing say,

"My wish be wi' sweet Willie!"

"Willie's rare, and Willie's fair,

And Willie's wondrous bonny;

And Willie hecht to marry me

Gin e'er he married ony.

"O gentle wind, that bloweth south

From where my Love repaireth,

Convey a kiss frae his dear mouth

And tell me how he fareth!

"O tell sweet Willie to come doun

And hear the mavis singing,

And see the birds on ilka bush

And leaves around them hinging.

"The lav'rock there, wi' her white breast

And gentle throat sae narrow;

There's sport eneuch for gentlemen

On Leader haughs and Yarrow.

"O Leader haughs are wide and braid

And Yarrow haughs are bonny;

There Willie hecht to marry me

If e'er he married ony.

"But Willie's gone, whom I thought on,

And does not hear the weeping

Draws many a tear frae's true love's e'e,

When other maids are sleeping.

"Yestreen I made my bed fu' braid,

The night I'll mak' it narrow,

For a' the lee-lang winter night

I lie twined o' my marrow.

"O came ye by yon water-side?

Pu'd you the rose or lily?

Or came you by yon meadow green,

Or saw you my sweet Willie?"

She sought him up, she sought him down,

She sought him braid and narrow;

Syne, in the cleaving of a crag,

She found him drowned in Yarrow!

Hecht (line 6) means vowed; haughs are water-meadows; and to be twined o' one's marrow, is to be separated from one's loved one.

[427]. The Twa Sisters.

Here is another ballad—"The Water o Wearie's Well,"—of a similar pattern. But in this the drowner of the King's daughters himself finds a "watery grave":

There came a bird out o a bush,

On water for to dine,

An sighing sair, says the king's daughter,

"O wae's this heart o mine!"

He's taen a harp into his hand,

He's harped them all asleep,

Except it was the king's daughter,

Who one wink couldna get.

He's luppen on his berry-brown steed,

Taen 'er on behind himsell,

Then baith rede down to that water

That they ca Wearie's Well.

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

No harm shall thee befall;

Oft times I've watered my steed

Wi the water o Wearie's Well."

The first step that she steppèd in,

She stepped to the knee;

And sighend says this lady fair,

"This water's nae for me."

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

No harm shall thee befall;

Oft times I've watered my steed

Wi the water o Wearie's Well."

The next step that she stepped in,

She stepped to the middle;

"O," sighend says this lady fair,

"I've wat my gowden girdle."

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

No harm shall thee befall;

Oft times have I watered my steed

Wi the water o Wearie's Well."

The next step that she steppèd in,

She stepped to the chin;

"O," sighend says this lady fair,

"They sud gar twa loves twin!"

"Seven king's daughters I've drownd there,

In the water o Wearie's Well,

And I'll make you the eight o them,

And ring the common bell."

"Since I am standing here," she says,

"This dowie death to die,

One kiss o your comely mouth

I'm sure wad comfort me."

He louted him oer his saddle bow,

To kiss her cheek and chin;

She's taen him in her arms twa,

And thrown him headlong in.

"Since seven king's daughters ye've drowned there,

In the water o Wearie's Well,

I'll make you bridegroom to them a',

An ring the bell mysell."

And aye she warsled, and aye she swam,

And she swam to dry lan;

She thankèd God most cheerfully

The dangers she oercame.

[428]. "Sweet William and May Margaret."

Hermione.Come Sir, now I am for you againe:

Pray you sit by us, and tell's a Tale.

Mamillius (her son).Merry, or sad, shal't bee?

Hermione.As merry as you will.

Mamillius.A sad Tale's best for Winter:

I have one of Sprights, and Goblins.

Hermione.Let's have that, good Sir.

Come-on, sit downe, come-on, and doe your best

To fright me with your Sprights: you're powrefull at it.

Mamillius.There was a man....

Hermione.Nay, come sit downe: then on.

Mamillius.Dwelt by a Churchyard:

I will tell it softly,

Yond Crickets shall not heare it.

Hermione.Come on then, and giv't me in mine eare....

The Winter's Tale

[429]. "That birk Grew fair eneugh." (stanza 6)

The strangest feature of these ballads is that the stories they tell, the customs, beliefs, lore they refer to, may be found scattered up and down all over the world. In Russia, for one small instance, the birk or birch tree is honoured in this fashion: A little before Whitsuntide, says Sir James Fraser in The Golden Bough, the young women, with dancing and feasting, cut down a living birch-tree, deck it with bright clothes or hang it with ribbons; then set it up as an honoured guest in one of the village houses. On Whit Sunday itself they fling it, finery and all, into a stream for a charm.

And now for England: "Thirty years ago," says Mrs. Wright, "it was still customary in some west-Midland districts to decorate village churches on Whit Sunday with sprigs of birch stuck in holes bored in the tops of the pews. I can remember this being done by an old village clerk in Herefordshire, but when he was gathered to his fathers in the same profession, the custom died with him." How happy must he have been then—as happy as for that one evening was the Wife of Usher's Well herself—to lift his eyes upon a silver birch brushing with its green tresses the very gates of Paradise!

[433]. "A spangle here."

Dew sate on Julia's haire,

And spangled too,

Like leaves that laden are

With trembling dew:

Or glittered to my sight,

As when the Beames

Have their reflected light,

Daunc't by the Streames.

Robert Herrick

If the daisies are not to shut their eyes until Julia shut hers, should they not most assuredly wait also until "dear love Isabella," shut hers? She was the bosom friend and aunt of Marjorie Fleming, Sir Walter Scott's little friend, who was born in 1803, and who, having written her few tim-tam-tot little rhymes, died in 1811. And here is Isabel:

Here lies sweet Isabell in bed,

With a night-cap on her head;

Her skin is soft, her face is fair,

And she has very pretty hair;

She and I in bed lies nice,

And undisturbed by rats or mice;

She is disgusted with Mr. Worgan,

Though he plays upon the organ.

Her nails are neat, her teeth are white,

Her eyes are very, very bright;

In a conspicuous town she lives,

And to the poor her money gives;

Here ends sweet Isabella's story,

And may it be much to her glory.

[434].

Bunyan's "Comparison" for this poem runs thus:

Our Gospel has had here a Summers day;

But in its Sun-shine we, like Fools, did play,

Or else fall out, and with each other wrangle,

And did instead of work not much but jangle.

And if our Sun seems angry, hides his face,

Shall it go down, shall Night possess this place?

Let not the voice of night-Birds us afflict,

And of our mis-spent Summer us convict.

[437].

From the "Songs of Innocence"; and this is from the "Songs of Experience":

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And whisp'rings are in the dale.

The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,

My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise;

Your spring and your day are wasted in play,

And your winter and night in disguise.

For to grow old and look back on one's childhood, though in much it is a happy thing, may be also a thing full of dread and regret. The old poets never wearied of bidding youth gather its roses, seize its fleeting moments. But not all roses are fresh and fragrant in the keeping, and "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

[440]. "Afterwards."

Every fine poem says much in little. It packs into the fewest possible words—by means of their sound, their sense, and their companionship—a wide or rare experience. So, in particular, with such a poem as this. It tells of a man thinking of the day when he shall have bidden goodbye to a world whose every live and lovely thing—Spring, hawk, evening, wintry skies—he has dearly loved. And if what it tells of is to be seen as clearly and truly as if it were before one's very eyes, it must be read intently—all one's imagination alert to gather up the full virtue of the words, and to picture in the mind each fleeting and living object in turn.

As I write these lines I cannot refrain from suggesting how thankful we should be to be living in a day when three great poets, who have been long in the world, are adding to the riches of English poetry—Thomas Hardy, Charles Doughty, and the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. It is but a little while, too, since the death of that exquisite writer, and lover of all things true and beautiful, Alice Meynell, and of W. H. Hudson, who was no less a poet because he wrote not in verse but in prose.

To compare the great things of one age with the great things of another is an exceedingly difficult task (and to pit poet against poet, or imagination against imagination, an exceedingly stupid one). But that in Elizabeth's day England was indeed a "nest of singing birds" may be realised by the fact that when Shakespeare was finishing his last play, The Tempest, in the Spring, apparently, of 1611—when, that is, he himself was aged 47 (and his Queen had been eight years dead), Sir Walter Raleigh was 59, Anthony Munday 58, Samuel Daniel 49, Michael Drayton 48, Thomas Campion 44, Thomas Dekker (?) 41, John Donne and Ben Jonson were 38, John Fletcher was 32, Francis Beaumont 27, William Drummond 26, John Ford 25, William Browne and Robert Herrick 20, Francis Quarles 19, George Herbert 18, Thomas Carew (?) 16, James Shirley 15, and John Milton (and Sir John Suckling) were 2. It was seven years before the birth of Richard Lovelace and Abraham Cowley, ten before Marvell's, and eleven before Vaughan's. Edmund Spenser had been twelve years dead, Sir Philip Sidney twenty-five—and Chaucer 211.

Two hundred and fifty years afterwards—in 1861—another great queen was on the Throne, Victoria. It was the year in which the Prince Consort died, and Edward, Prince of Wales, came of age. Nor was England's garden silent then: for in that year William Barnes and Cardinal Newman were 60, Edward Fitzgerald and Tennyson were 52, Robert Browning 49, Charles Kingsley 42, Matthew Arnold 39, Coventry Patmore 38, William Allingham 37, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith were 33, Christina Rossetti was 31, William Morris 27, Algernon Swinburne 24, Mr. Thomas Hardy was 21, Mr. Robert Bridges 17, Robert Louis Stevenson 11, and Francis Thompson was 2. Other great writers, in English, then alive were Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Ruskin, Darwin and Huxley; Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Walt Whitman. So the strange flame of genius fitfully burns in this world. And 1611 knew as little of 1861 as 1861 knew of 2111. (But would that 1923 could leave to the future one-tenth part of such a legacy as did 1611—the English Bible!)

But to return to Shakespeare. He was born in April 1564. About 1591 he wrote the first of his plays, Love's Labour's Lost. By 1611 he had finished the last of them; 34 in all as they appear in the first Folio, 37 as they now appear in the Canon. And apart from these, his Poems. There followed a strange silence. On the 25th of March, 1616, "in perfect health and memory (God be praised!)," he made his will. On St. George's Day, 1616, he died. To reflect for a moment on that brief lifetime, on that twenty years' work which is now a perennial fountain of happiness, light and wisdom to the whole world, is to marvel indeed. The life-giving secret of this supreme genius none can tell. We know not even our own. But there is a story told by Thomas Campbell: "It was predicted of a young man lately belonging to one of our universities, that he would certainly become a prodigy because he read sixteen hours a day. 'Ah, but,' said somebody, 'how many hours a day does he think?' It might have been added, 'How many hours does he feel?'" So of Shakespeare. As, then, said his old friends and fellow-players, John Heminge and Henry Condell in their Preface to the Folio: "Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger...."

[441]. "With such a Sky."

It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:

Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder—everlastingly....

William Wordsworth

[442]. "Shepherds all, and Maidens fair, Fold your Flocks."

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight.

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:...

These lines and the stanzas that follow them in the Elegy in a Country Churchyard are as familiar as any in English, and may be found in almost every collection of poems. Here, "a figure on paper"—from a letter to a friend written by the author of them, Thomas Gray, on November 19, 1764, is a description—not of evening after the setting of the sun— but of a sun-rise as vivid as if one's own naked eye had watched its "Levee":

I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the Sun's Levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreathes, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and all at once a little line of unsufferable brightness that (before I can write these five words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall remember it, as long as the sun, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before? I hardly believe it."

So each day, one remembers, the sun rises, indeed is rising always above some watchful eye's horizon, and we come so to expect its rising, and so to be assured of it, as though it were no less certain than that twice two are four. But, in fact, it is only just certain enough to prevent night from being a dreadful apprehension, and life from becoming a mere routine. As Coleridge says in his Table Talk:

"Suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the western horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved by scarce a ray of hope that he shall ever see the glorious light again. The next evening, when it declines, his hopes are stronger, but still mixed with fear; and even at the end of a thousand years, all that a man can feel is a hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety."

... High among the lonely hills,

While I lay beside my sheep,

Rest came down and filled my soul,

From the everlasting deep.

Changeless march the stars above,

Changeless morn succeeds to even;

Still the everlasting hills

Changeless watch the changeless heaven....

Charles Kingsley

[444]. "The children are going to bed."

Hush-a-ba, birdie, croon, croon,

Hush-a-ba, birdie, croon.

The Sheep are gane to the siller wood,

And the cows are gane to the broom, broom.

And it's braw milking the kye, kye,

It's braw milking the kye,

The birds are singing, the bells are ringing,

And the wild deer come galloping by, by.

And hush-a-ba, birdie, croon, croon,

Hush-a-ba, birdie, croon.

The Gaits are gane to the mountain hie,

And they'll no be hame till noon, noon.

This for the littlest ones, the cradle-creatures. But for the rest:

Boys and Girls, come out to play,

The Moon doth shine as bright as day;

Come with a whoop, come with a call,

Come with a goodwill or don't come at all;

Lose your supper and lose your sleep—

So come to your playmates in the street.

And if you should want actually to bring that Moon to earth, this is how Quince managed it in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The Rehearsal.

Snout.Doth the Moone shine that night wee play our play?

Bottom.A Calender, a Calender, looke in the Almanack, finde out Moone-shine, finde out Moone-shine.

Quince.Yes, it doth shine that night.

Bottom.Why then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window (where we play) open, and the Moone may shine in at the casement.

Quince.Ay, or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorne, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present the person of Moone-shine....

The Play.

Lysander.Proceed, Moone.

Moone.All that I have to say, is to tell you, that the Lanthorne is the Moone; I, the man in the Moone; this thorne bush, my thorne bush; and this dog, my dog....

And here is a stanza from a very old poem about that same "man in the Moone":

Mon, in the mone, stond ant streit,

On is bot-forke is burthen he bereth:

Hit is muche wonder that he na down slyt,

For doute leste he valle he shoddreth ant shereth:

When the frost freseth muche chele he byd,

The thornes beth kene is hattren to-tereth;

Nis no wytht in the world that wot wen he syt,

Ne, bote hit bue the hegge, whet wedes he wereth.

which means, I gather, that

the Man in the Moon stands up there stark and still in her silver, carrying his thornbush on his pitchfork. It's a marvel he doesn't slide down; he's shuddering and shaking at the thought of it. When the frost sharpens, he'll be frozen to his marrow. The prickles stick out to tear his clothes; but nobody in the world has seen him sit down, or knows apart from his thornbush what he has on.

I see the Moon,

The Moon sees me;

God bless the sailors,

And bless me.

[449]. "That busy Archer." (line 4)

Though I am young and cannot tell

Either what Love or Death is well,

Yet I have heard they both bear darts

And both do aim at human hearts....

Ben Jonson

"Are Beauties there as proud as here they be." (line 11)

... The palace of her father the King, was on that side the Moon no mortal sees, and of such an enchantment was her cold beauty that on earth none resembles it. Yet all her flattery and pride was but to win the idolatrous love of far-travelling Princes, or even of wanderers of common blood; for the sake of that love and admiration only. And many perished in those rock-bound deserts and parched and icy lunar wildernesses on account of this proud damsel; before a strange fate befell her....

Here, too, is a fragment (from a thirteenth century MS.), to be found in A Medieval Garner:

"What shall we say of the ladies when they come to feasts? Each marks well the other's head; they wear bosses like horned beasts, and if any have no horns, she is a laughing stock for the rest. Their arms go merrily when they come into the room; they display their kerchiefs of silk and cambric, set on their buttons of coral and amber, and cease not their babble so long as they are in the bower.... But however well their attire be fashioned, when the feast is come, it pleases them nought; so great is their envy now and so high grows their pride, that the bailiff's daughter counterfeits the lady.'"

[450]. "She hath no Air." (line 5)

—and that being so:

".... There will be no sounds on the moon.... Even a meteor shattering itself to a violent end against the surface of the moon would make no noise. Nor would it herald its coming by glowing into a 'shooting star,' as it would on entering the earth's atmosphere. There will be no floating dust, no scent, no twilight, no blue sky, no twinkling of the stars. The sky will be always black and the stars will be clearly visible by day as by night. The sun's wonderful corona, which no man on earth, even by seizing every opportunity during eclipses, can hope to see for more than two hours in all, in a long lifetime, will be visible all day. So will the great red flames of the sun.... There will be no life (since) for fourteen days there is continuous night, when the temperature must sink away down towards the absolute cold of space. This will be followed without an instant of twilight by full daylight. For another fourteen days the sun's rays will bear straight down, with no diffusion or absorption of their heat, or light, on the way...."

This is a matter-of-fact fragment out of "The Outline of Science," edited by Professor J. Arthur Thompson; but it would not be easy to say exactly how in its magical effect on the mind it differs from poetry. Indeed, there can hardly be a quicker journey to the comprehension of scientific fact than by way of the imagination. Moonless mountainous Hesper, the Evening Star, is an even lovelier thing to watch shining in the fading rose and green of sunset when we realise that at her most radiant—a radiance that casts an earthly shadow even—it is but a slim crescent of the planet that we see, a planet, too, almost sister in magnitude to the earth, but whose briefer year is of an ardour that might be happiness to fiery sprite and salamander, but would be unendurable to watery creatures like ourselves. Nor could language be used more scientifically (concisely, pregnantly and exactly), than in the words moving, human, mask, in the following sonnet by John Keats—a sonnet written in mortal illness and in immortal sorrowfulness:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

John Keats

[455]. "Right good is rest."

Come, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving

Lock me in delight awhile;

Let some pleasing dreams beguile

All my fancies: that from thence

I may feel an influence

All my powers of care bereaving!

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,

Let me know some little joy!

We that suffer long annoy

Are contented with a thought

Through an idle fancy wrought:

O let my joys have some abiding!

John Fletcher

[457]. Before Sleeping.

I have pieced this rhyme together from well-known versions and fragments. But the Angels?—

"And after that, I sawe iiij Angels stande on the iiij corners of the erth holdynge the foure wyndes of the erth, that the wyndes shuld not blowe on the erth, nether on the see, nether on eny tree."

The Revelation of S. John the Divine (1539).

"And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands."

The Same (1611).

Of these Angels, having their fitting place among the hierarchies—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels—no names are given. But Michael and Gabriel are archangels named in the Bible, and in the Apocrypha and elsewhere, Raphael, Zadkiel, Uriel, Chamuel, Jophiel. These too; steadfast or fallen: Samael, Semalion, Abdiel and gigantic Sandalphon, Rahab, Prince of the Sea; Ridia, Prince of the Rain; Yurkemi, Prince of the Hail; Af of Anger; Abaddona of Destruction; Lailah of Night. And in Paradise Lost:

Now had night measured with her shadowy cone

Halfway up-hill this vast sublunar vault;

And from their ivory port the Cherubim

Forth issuing, at the accustomed hour, stood armed....

Then speak together Gabriel, Uzziel, Ithuriel, Zephon. And last—not the most distant from mortal love—strangely-angelled Poe's shrill-tongued Israfel:

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell

Whose heart-strings are a lute;

None sing so wildly well

As the angel Israfel,

And the giddy stars (so legends tell),

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell

Of his voice, all mute....

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this

Is a world of sweets and sours;

Our flowers are merely—flowers,

And the shadow of thy perfect bliss

Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell

Where Israfel

Hath dwelt, and he where I,

He might not sing so wildly well

A mortal melody,

While a bolder note than this might swell

From my lyre within the sky.

Oh speake againe bright angell, for thou art

As glorious to this night being ore my head,

As is a wingèd messenger of heaven

Unto the white upturned wondring eyes

Of mortalls that fall backe to gaze on him.

Romeo and Juliet

In paint and wood and words and stone Man has for centuries made pictures and images for symbols of angelic might and beauty. But what does he know of these Beings in themselves?—"That there are distinct orders of Angels, assuredly I believe, but what they are I cannot tell.... They are creatures that have not so much of a body as flesh is, as froth is, as a vapour is, as a sigh is; and yet with a touch they shall moulder a rock into less atoms than the sand that it stands upon, and a millstone into smaller flour than it grinds. They are creatures made, and yet not a minute older than when they were first made, if they were made before all measures of time begun; nor, if they were made in the beginning of time, and be now six thousand years old, have they one wrinkle of age in their face, one sob of weariness in their lungs. They are primogeniti Dei, God's eldest sons...."

John Donne

[459].

This is the Song sung by his guardian Angel to a young sleeping Prince who has been cheated of his inheritance. It was printed by Charles Lamb in his English Dramatic Poets, from a Tragedy entitled The Conspiracy, written by Henry Killigrew when he was seventeen.

[460]. The Legend of St. Mark.

The relics of this Saint, who for his miracles was thought to be a sorcerer, and was murdered by a mob, were interred in Alexandria. Hundreds of years afterwards these relics were coveted by the Venetians by reason of the story that the Saint had once visited their city and had heard speak to him an angel: Pax tibi, Marce. Hic requiescet corpus tuum. At length two Venetian merchants, having persuaded the Alexandrians that the sacred bones lay in danger of the raiding Saracens, travelled back with them to their own city, where they were reinterred with solemn ceremony in St. Mark's. This church was afterwards burned to the ground, and the relics were lost. A century passed; a wondrously beautiful church had arisen from the ashes of the old, and during the ceremony held in the faith that it would be revealed where they lay hid, suddenly a light shone forth from one of the great piers, there was a sound of falling masonry, and, lo, the body of the Saint, with arm outstretched, as if at finger's touch he had revealed his secret resting-place.

"Doves of Siam, Lima mice,
And legless birds of Paradise." (p. 470.)

What particular kinds of doves and mice Keats had in mind here I cannot yet discover. But, according to Topsell, mice are of these kinds: the short, small, fearful, peaceable, ridiculous, rustik, or country mouse, the urbane or citty mouse, the greedy, wary, unhappy, harmefull, black, obscene, little, whiner, biter, and earthly mouse. Mice, too, he says, are "sometimes blackish, sometimes white, sometimes yellow, sometimes broune and sometimes ashe colour. There are white mice amonge the people of Savoy, and Dolphin in France, called alaubroges, which the inhabitants of the country do beleev that they feede upon snow." Then, again, "the field mouse, the farie, with a long snout; and the sleeper, that is of a dun colour and will run on the edge of a sword and sleep on the point."

What Topsell meant by "whiner" I am uncertain, but it may be he refers to the mouse that sings. That is a habit quite distinct from the common squeaking, shrilling and shrieking. It resembles the slow low trill of a very distant and sleepy canary, but sweeter and more domestic, and is as pleasant a thing to hear behind a wainscot, as it is to watch the creatures gambolling. Why women are apt to fear these tiny beasts is a mystery. But whatever mischief their ravagings may cause, may I never live under a roof wherein (Cat or no Cat) there is no inch of house-room for Mistress Mouse!

The fable that the Bird of Paradise is "legless" was set abroad by travellers who had seen in old days its exquisite dismembered carcase prepared for merchandise. It is hard to explain that Man, capable of imagining a bird "whose fixed abode is the region of the air," sustaining itself "solely on dew," can also slaughter it and tie it up in bundles for feminine finery. But so it is.

"At Venice...." (p. 471)

So Keats left—unfinished—this, one of the happiest of his poems. There are others in this volume: but not the Eve of St. Agnes, or Hyperion, or the odes, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, or the strange On Melancholy. Nor are any of his Letters here—as full a revelation of the powers and understanding of that rare mind, as the poems are of his imagination.

[466]. "Low in the South the 'cross'."

We peoples of the Northern hemisphere, from the Chinese and Chaldaeans until this last flitting hour have the joy of so many brilliant and neighbouring stars in our night sky that for us it is now full of stories, and thronged with constellations of our own fantasy and naming. The Chair of Cassiopeia, for instance, is but a feigned passing picture. Nevertheless, how pleasant it is to recognise it set zigzag in the night. For this reason the peoples of the Southern hemisphere, with their Crown and Net, their Phoenix and Peacock, hold dear the Southern Cross. It marks their very home.

And, once more, let me repeat what Miss Taroone said to me: Learn the common names of every thing you see, Simon; and especially of those that please you most to remember: then give them names also of your own making and choosing—if you can. Mr. Nahum has thousands upon thousands of words and names in his mind and yet he often fails to understand what I say to him. Nor does he always remember that though every snail is a snail and a Hoddydoddy, and every toad is a toad and a Joey, and every centipede is a centipede and a Maggie-monyfeet, each is just as much only its own self as you, Simon, are You.

[469]. "Once a Dream did weave a Shade."

Full in the passage of the vale, above,

A sable, silent, solemn, forest stood,

Where nought but shadowy forms was seen to move,

As idless fancy'd in her dreaming mood;

And up the hills, on either side, a wood

Of blackening pines, ay waving to and fro,

Sent forth a sleepy horror thro' the blood;

And where this valley winded out, below,

The murmuring main was heard, and scarcely heard, to flow.

A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,

Of Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,

And of gay Castles in the clouds that pass,

For ever flushing round a summer sky....

James Thomson

[470]. "Awake, Awake!"

"I thank God for my happy dreams," wrote Sir Thomas Browne in the Religio Medici, "as I do for my good rest.... And surely it is not a melancholy conceit [or fancy] to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day. There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul...."

The Door of Death is made of gold,

That Mortal Eyes cannot behold;

But, when the Mortal Eyes are closed,

And cold and pale the Limbs reposed,

The Soul awakes; and, wondering sees

In her mild Hand the golden Keys:

The Grave is Heaven's golden Gate,

And rich and poor around it wait;

O Shepherdess of England's Fold,

Behold this Gate of Pearl and Gold!...

I give you the end of a golden string;

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,

Built in Jerusalem's wall.

William Blake

[473]. "Does the Road wind Up-hill all the Way."

"Gentle herdsman, tell to me,

Of courtesy I thee pray,

Unto the town of Walsingham

Which is the right and ready way."

"Unto the town of Walsingham

The way is hard for to be gone;

And very crooked are those paths,

For you to find out all alone...."

Not so Babylon:

How many Miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten.

Can I get there by candle-light?

Ay: and back again.

[477].

This poem for its full beauty must be read very slowly. Eve in long memory is musing within herself, hardly able to utter the words, because of her grief and sorrow, and of the heavy sighs between them.

"Death is the Fruit."

I am Eve, great Adam's wife,

'Tis I that outraged Jesus of old;

'Tis I that robbed my children of Heaven,

By rights 'tis I that should have gone upon the Cross....

There would be no ice in any place,

There would be no glistening windy winter,

There would be no hell, there would be no sorrow,

There would be no fear, if it were not for me.

Tr. Kuno Meyer

"The kind Hart's Tears were falling." (stanza 7)

To day my Lord of Amiens, and my selfe,

Did steale behinde him as he lay along

Under an oake, whose anticke roote peepes out

Upon the brooke that brawles along this wood.

To the which place a poore sequestred Stag

That from the Hunter's aime had tane a hurt,

Did come to languish; and indeed my Lord

The wretched annimall heaved forth such groanes

That their discharge did stretch his leatherne coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round teares

Coursed one another downe his innocent nose

In pitteous chase....

As You Like It

[483]. "This is the Key."

And so—like the mediaeval traveller who had made a complete circuit of the world without knowing it—we have come back to the place which we started from. "The Elephant," says Topsell, in his Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, "is delighted above measure with sweet savours, ointments, and smelling flowers, for which cause their Keeper will in the summer time lead them into the meadows of flowers, where they of themselves will by the quickness of their smelling, choose out and gather the sweetest flowers, and put them into a basket if their Keeper have any....

(Having sought) out water (wherewith) to wash themselves, (they will) of their own accord return back again to the basket of flowers, which, if they find not, they will bray and call for them. Afterward, being led into their stable, they will not eat meat until they take off their flowers and dress the brims of their manger therewith, and likewise strew their room or standing place, pleasing themselves with their meat, because of the savour of the flowers stuck about their cratch." Mr. Nahum himself, it seems to me, might have written that. What was his Other Worlde but such "a Basket of Flowers": the forthshowing in formal beauty—in this world's soil, and beneath ministering rain, sunshine and dew—of the imaginations of men? Even Miss Taroone could have uttered a secret word or two in the great ear of the Elephants at their cratch: and were there not in her garden at Thrae flowers beyond telling?—William Blake's:

First ere the morning breaks joy opens in the flowery bosoms,

Joy even to tears.... First the Wild Thyme

And Meadow-sweet downy and soft waving among the reeds

Light springing on the air lead the sweet Dance: they wake

The Honeysuckle sleeping on the Oak: the flaunting beauty

Revels along upon the wind: the White-thorn, lovely May,

Opens her many lovely eyes: listening the Rose still sleeps:

None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson curtained bed,

And comes forth in the majesty of beauty: every Flower,

The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wall-flower, the Carnation,

The Jonquil, the mild Lilly opes her heavens: every Tree

And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance.

Yet all in order sweet and lovely....

And so, Farewell.

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