George Herbert’s work is so perfectly a box where thoughts ‘compacted lie,’ that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this—
‘He was a garden in a Paradise.’
The Rose.—Page [99].
There is nothing else of Waller’s fine enough to be admitted here; and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argument of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: ‘Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love.’ This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was—time out of mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.
L’Allegro.—Page [109].
The sock represents the stage, in L’Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.
Il Penseroso.—Page [113].
It is too late to protest against Milton’s display of weak Italian. Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.
Lycidas.—Page [119].
Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; ‘the great vision’ means the apparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael’s Mount; Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land’s End.