Where to gain a favor is
More than light perpetual bliss;
Oh make me live by serving you."
On this the editress says: "I have always been inclined to believe that this line should read: 'More than life, perpetual bliss.'" The image here, where the whole figure is taken from flowers, is of being planted and growing in the glow of the mistress's beauty, whose favor is more fructifying than the sun, and to which he immediately begs to be recalled, "back again, to this light." To say that living anywhere is "more than life" is a forced bombastic notion not in the way of Beaumont and Fletcher, but coming later, and rather characteristic of Poe, with his rant about
"that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life."
Mrs. Richardson's notes, in fact, contradict the impression of thoroughness which her selecting, we are glad to say, leaves on the mind. She is aware that the "Ode to Melancholy" in The Nice Valour begins in the same way as Milton's "Pensieroso," but she does not seem to know that the latter is also closely imitated from Burton's poem in his Anatomy of Melancholy. And she quotes John Still's "Jolly Good Ale and Old" as a "panegyric on old sack," sack being sweet wine.
The publishers have done their part, and made of these drops of oozed gold what is called "an elegant trifle" for the holidays. Mr. John La Farge, a very "advanced" sort of artist and illustrator, has furnished some embellishments which will be better liked by people of broad culture, and especially by enthusiasts for Japanese art, than they will be by ordinary Christmas-shoppers, though the frontispiece to "Songs of Fairies," representing Psyche floating among water-lilies, is beautiful enough and obvious enough for anybody.