The best love-poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amply fulfill the requirements suggested by Southey: their sentiment is always “necessary, and voluptuous, and right.” They are no “made-dishes at the Muses’ banquet,” but each one appears as the embodiment of a passing emotion. In those three faultless little verses “Going to the Wars,” a single thought is presented us,—regretful love made heroic by the loyal farewell of the soldier suitor:—
“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I flee.
“True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field,
And, with a stronger faith, embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
“Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore,—
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”
In the still more beautiful lines, “To Althea from Prison,” passion, made dignified by suffering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, happy with his chains:—
“If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.”
In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, revealing the finer grain of that impetuous soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the stormy waters of life. Whether we think of Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptuous court, or as dying of want in a cellar; whether we picture him as sighing at the feet of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country and his king; whether he is winning all hearts by the resistless charms of voice and presence, or returning broken from battle to suffer the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we know that in his two famous lyrics we possess the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, of that troubled and many-sided existence. A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, has been preserved from oblivion by a little wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good-natured contentment and disbelief that we grow young and cheerful again in contemplating it. Should any long-suffering reader desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth century—Mr. Browning’s word-picture of “A Pretty Woman,” for example—back to those swinging and jocund lines where Phillis,
“Faithless as the winds or seas,”
smiles furtively upon her suitor, whose clearsightedness avails him nothing, and who plays the game merrily to the end:—
“She deceiving,
I believing,
What need lovers wish for more?”