I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched
What stirred it so. Alas, I found it Love!”
Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess—bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms—and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:—
“Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There’s nought in this life, sweet,
If man were wise to see’t,
But only melancholy,
O sweetest melancholy!