The presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the sure sign of the visit of that unlooked-for muse. With all spirit and subtlety does Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T. C. (the future ‘virtuous enemy of man’) the prophetic homage of the habitual poets. The poem closes with an impassioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in Marvell.
The Definition of Love.—Page [179].
The noble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, high or low, throughout Marvell’s book, if we except one single splendid and surpassing passage from The Definition of Love—
‘Magnanimous despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing.’
Childhood.—Page [183].
One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the full spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but students until Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition. The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw’s lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life. Vaughan’s imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than a century—and such a century!—from him to Wordsworth. The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray—of the world, the world, whether reasonable or flippant or rhetorical—is more strange. Vaughan’s phrase and diction seem to carry the light. Il vous semble que cette femme dégage de la lumière en marchant? Vous l’aimez! says Marius in Les Misérables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of light that we know the muse we are to love.
Scottish Ballads.—Page [191].
It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had passages of genius—a line here and there of surpassing imagination and poetry—rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind. ‘None but my foe to be my guide’ so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher’s Well; its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken by Margaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret; and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as that beginning, ‘I saw the new moon late yestreen,’ the stanza beginning ‘O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords,’ and almost all the stanzas following. A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing quality throughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson’s version of Fair Annie, for Edom o’ Gordon, for The Dæmon Lover, for Edward, Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.
Mrs. Anne Killigrew.—Page [205].
This most majestic ode—one of the few greatest of its kind—is a model of noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it whole would be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book is made in the midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far from simplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said something fine, caps it with something foolish. The suppressed part of the ode is silly with a silliness which Dryden’s age chose to dodder in when it would. The deplorable ‘rattling bones’ of the closing section has a touch of it.