You’d drop a teare,
Seeing more harmonie
In her bright eye,
Then now you heare.
Then = than. See next quotation.
I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded blossom-like dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years; concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy; blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the woman’s soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.
George Eliot (Adam Bede).
George Eliot would not know the preceding poem by Campion, whose lyrics had been forgotten until A. H. Bullen revived them in 1889; and most probably also she did not know Lovelace’s poem, as it is not one of the two or three lyrics by which alone he is remembered.