The fourth eclogue of his Shepherd’s Pipe is thought, not improbably, to have been in the recollection of Milton, when he wrote Lycidas. Like that poem, it is an elegy on the death of a friend. The line marked in the following quatrain might have appeared in Lycidas, without any injury to it. It is, indeed, very Miltonic:—
In deepest passions of my grief-swol’n breast,
Sweet soul! this only comfort seizeth me,
That so few years should make thee so much blest,
And give such wings to reach eternity.
In this poem is a description of autumn, in which the different metres are unfortunately but ill-assorted:—they look like bits of elegies begun on different plans; but the third line of the first quatrain is well felt; the fourth not unworthy of it; the watery meadows are capitally painted; and the closing stanza is like an affecting one taken out of some old English ballad:—
Autumn it was, when droop’d the sweetest flowers,
And rivers, swollen with pride, o’erlook’d the banks;
Poor grew the day of summer’s golden hours,
And void of sap stood Ida’s cedar ranks.
The pleasant meadows sadly lay
In chill and cooling sweats
By rising fountains, or as they
Fear’d winter’s wasteful threats.
Against the broad-spread oaks
Each wind in fury bears;
Yet fell their leaves not half so fast
As did the shepherd’s tears.
The feeling of analogy between the oak, with its scattered leaves, and the naturally strong man shedding tears for sorrow, is in the best imaginative taste. Had Browne written all thus, he would have found plenty of commentators. The Shepherd’s Pipe was a somewhat later production than the other pastorals; and had he lived he would probably have surpassed all that his youth produced. Unfortunately, his mind never appears to have outgrown a certain juvenile ambition of ingenious thoughts and conceits; and it is these that render it so difficult to make any long quotation from his works. The sixth line in the following is very obscure, perhaps corrupted. But the rest has great liveliness and nature:—
Look as a lover, with a lingering kiss,
About to part with the best half that’s his;
Fain would he stay, but that he fears to do it,
And curseth time for so fast hastening to it;
Now takes his leave, and yet begins anew
To make less vows than are esteem’d true;
Then says he must be gone, and then doth find
Something he should have spoke that’s out of mind;
And whilst he stands to look for’t in her eyes,
Their sad sweet glance so ties his faculties
To think from what he parts, that he is now
As far from leaving her, or knowing how,
As when he came; begins his former strain,
To kiss, to vow, and take his leave again;
Then turns, comes back, sighs, parts, and yet doth go,
Apt to retire, and loth to leave her so;—
Brave stream, so part I from thy flowery bank.
Browne is fond of drawing his similes from real, and even homely life, and often seems to introduce them for the purpose of giving that kind of variety to a pastoral, otherwise ideal; for though the title of his poem is British, and the scene also, it is in other respects Arcadian and Pagan. The effect is somewhat jarring; and yet it is impossible to quarrel with the particular descriptions:—
As children on a play-day leave the schools,
And gladly run into the swimming pools;
Or in the thickets, all with nettles stung,
Rush to despoil some sweet thrush of her young;
Or with their hats for fish lade in a brook
Withouten pain; but when the morn doth look
Out of the eastern gates, a snail would faster
Glide to the schools, than they unto their master;
So when before I sung the songs of birds, &c.
The following is a complete picture:—
—As a nimble squirrel from the wood,
Ranging the hedges for his filbert food,
Sits partly on a bough, his brown nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking,
Till, with their crooks and bags, a sort of boys
To share with him, come with so great a noise,
That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke,
And for his life leap to a neighbour oak,
Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes,
Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes
The boys run dabbling through thick and thin;
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin;
This, torn and tattered, hath with much ado
Got to the briers, and that hath lost his shoe;
This dropt his band, that headlong falls for haste,
Another cries behind for being last;
With sticks and stones, and many a sounding hollow,
The little pool with no small sport they follow,
Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray
Gets to the wood, and hides him in his dray;
Such shift made Riot, ere he could get up, &c.