The Daisy over all those sundry sweets so thick.”
The garden-flowers follow in equal fulness of array; and get an even better setting in one of his Nymphals, where they are garlanded about the head of Tita; and in these pretty Nymphals, and still more in the airy, fairy Nymphidia—with their elfins and crickets and butterflies, one will get an earlier smack of our own “Culprit Fay.” Those who love the scents of ancient garden-grounds—as we do—will relish the traces of garden love in this old Warwickshire man. In his Heroic Epistles, too, one will find a mastership of ringing couplets: and there are spirit and dash in that clanging battle ode of his which sets forth the honors and the daring of Agincourt. Its martial echoes—kept alive by Campbell (“Battle of the Baltic”) and revived again in Tennyson’s “Balaclava,” warrant me in citing two stanzas of the original:—
“Warwick in blood did wade,
Oxford the foe invade,
And cruel slaughter made
Still as they ran up;
Suffolk his axe did ply,
Beaumont and Willoughby
Bear them right doughtily,
Ferrers and Fanhope.