We are to suppose it lying in sunny flakes. Lodge, though he was an Oxford man, or perhaps for that reason, has curiously mixed up Paganism and Christianity in Glaucus’s complaint of his mistress: but the second verse is fine, and the last truly lover-like and touching:—
Alas, sweet nymphs, my godhead’s all in vain;
For why? this breast includes immortal pain.
Scylla hath eyes, but two sweet eyes hath Scylla;
Scylla hath hands, fair hands, but coy in touching:
Scylla in wit surpasseth grave Sibylla:
(This is the Sibyl of Æneas)
Scylla hath words, but words well-stored with grutching;
Scylla, a saint in look, no saint in scorning,
Look saint-like, Scylla, lest I die with mourning.
The modulation and antithetical turn of these verses will remind the reader not only of Lodge’s friends, Peele and Greene, who had both a fine ear for music, but of Shakspeare’s first production, Venus and Adonis, in which he exhibited that fondness for classical fable which never forsook him. It is remarkable indeed, that the old English poets, and those true successors of theirs whom we have seen in our own time, have been almost more Greek in this respect than the Greeks themselves. Spenser was half made up of it; Milton could not help introducing it in Paradise Lost; and it was rescued from the degradation it underwent in the French school of poetry, with its cant about the “Paphian bower,” and its identifications of Venus and Chloe, by the inspired Muse of Keats. The young English poet has told the present story in his Endymion, though not in his best manner, except where he speaks of Circe; of the inflictions of whose sorcery he gives a scene of the finest and most appalling description:—
A sight too fearful for the feel of fear.—
In thicket hid—
(It is Glaucus who is speaking, and whom the poet represents as having been beguiled into Circe’s love)—
In thicket hid I curs’d the haggard scene—
The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen,
Seated upon an uptorn forest root,
And all around her shapes, wizard and brute,
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpenting.
Fierce, wan,
And tyrannizing was the lady’s look,
As over them a gnarled staff she shook.
The look of a sorceress, full of bad passions, was never painted more strongly than in the meeting of those epithets, “wan and tyrannizing;” and the word “lady” makes the fierceness more shocking.
But Keats had not the heart to make the love-part of the story end unhappily, much less to endure the brutification of the lovely limbs of Scylla. He revived her to be put into a Lovers’ Elysium. So, in telling the story of Alpheus and Arethusa, he will not let Arethusa reject Alpheus willingly. He makes her lament the necessity as one of the train of Diana; and leaves us to conclude that the lovers became happy. It would hardly be necessary to tell any reader (only it is as pleasant to repeat these stories, as it is to hear beautiful old airs) that Alpheus was a river-god of Greece, who fell in love with the wood-nymph Arethuse; and that the latter, praying for help to Diana, was converted into a stream, and pursued under land and sea by the other enamoured water, as far as the island of Sicily, where the streams became united. The strangeness of the adventure, and the beauty of the names, have made everybody in love with the story. All the world knows how “divine Alpheus,” as Milton says—