Dirge.—Page [44].
I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less beautiful stanza.
Follow.—Page [49].
Campion’s ‘airs,’ for which he wrote his words, laid rules too urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, ‘touching in its majesty’—
‘Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!’
Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are speechless, with these two final lines—
‘If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!’
Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.
‘Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me’
is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in this—