And like the bee, if home the spoil we bear,
Hived in our hearts, it turns to nectar there.
Anne C. Lynch.
III.
Spring.
Giles Fletcher is one of the old English poets but little known to the general reader in America. And yet he was the author of a poem of high merit. He was born about twenty years after Shakspeare, or in 1588, and came of a family marked by great poetical talent. John Fletcher, the celebrated dramatist and fellow-laborer of Beaumont, was a cousin, and it was his elder brother, Phineas Fletcher, who wrote “The Purple Island,” that singular and elaborate poetical allegory, carried out through twelve cantos, and relieved by much occasional beauty of thought and style. The father also, Dr. Giles Fletcher, has been ranked among the good poets of his day. The only work of Giles Fletcher, the son, which has been published, is of a religious character, “Christ’s Victory and Triumph,” a poem in four parts. It has never been reprinted entire in America, though full of fine passages, and marked throughout with originality and beauty. The subjects are of course very much of the same nature as those of “Paradise Regained;” a comparison of the two poems, however, by no means diminishes our admiration for the work of Fletcher, especially when we bear in mind that he wrote half a century before Milton. In fact, “Christ’s Victory and Triumph” was, at the time it appeared, the finest sacred poem of any length in our language; it is full of a jubilant poetical eloquence and the earnest expression of strong religious feeling connected with the subject. Giles Fetcher, like his brother Phineas, was a clergyman of the Church of England, and led an uneventful life in his country parish of Alderton, Suffolk, where he died in 1623.
A description of Spring at Easter will, it is hoped, give the reader pleasure.
THE RETURN OF SPRING IN GREECE.
FROM THE GREEK OF MELEAGER, 100 B. C.
Hush’d is the howl of wintry breezes wild;