Besides his Celia, Carew has celebrated several other ladies of the Court, and particularly Lady Mary Villars; the Countess of Anglesea; Lady Carlisle, the theme of all the poets of her age, and her lovely daughter, Lady Anne Hay, on whom he wrote an elegy, which begins with some lines never surpassed in harmony and tenderness.
I heard the virgin's sigh! I saw the sleek
And polish'd courtier channel his fresh cheek
With real tears; the new betrothed maid
Smil'd not that day; the graver senate laid
Their business by; of all the courtly throng
Grief seal'd the heart, and silence bound the tongue!
....*....*....*....*
We will not bathe thy corpse with a forc'd tear,
Nor shall thy train borrow the blacks they wear;
Such vulgar spice and gums embalm not thee,
That art the theme of Truth, not Poetry.
Here Carew has fallen into the vulgar error, that poetry and fiction are synonymous.
Lady Anne Wentworth,[2] daughter of the first Earl of Cleveland, who, after making terrible havoc in the heart of the Lord Chief Justice Finch, married Lord Lovelace, is another of Carew's fair heroines. For her marriage he wrote the epithalamium,
Break not the slumbers of the bride, &c.
As Carew is not a popular poet, nor often found in a lady's library, I add a few extracts of peculiar beauty.
TO CELIA.
Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauties orient dee
Those flowers as in their causes sleep.