"O RARE BEN JONSON!"
VIII. I pass with reluctance over the contemporaries of Spenser and Shakspeare; contemporaries who aided in gaining for the Elizabethan age the title of "Augustan."13 I will not, however, leave this ground, without quoting a few verses, imitated from the Italian of Petrarch, by Elizabeth herself. The lines begin a little poem, composed by the queen, "upon Mount Zeur's departure."14 They are not wanting in music:
| "I grieve, yet dare not shew my discontent; I love, and yet am forst to seem to hate; I doe, yet dare not say I ever meant; I seeme starke mute, but inwardly do prate; I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself my other self I turned." |
13 It was for wit that the reign of Augustus was celebrated. The age preceding, was that of strength. The Elizabethan age combined these.
14 Ashmol. muss. MSS. p. 142.
Passing on, we find "the melancholy Cowley." Cowley has ever been a favorite with lovers; for love maddens men, and madness will always find pleasant aliment in the metaphysical and metaphorical love verses of this unnatural poet. The following is a loose paraphrase of one of Anacreon's wine songs; so loose that we may as well style it original, and adduce it as a specimen not only of Cowley's strange conceits, but also of all the poetry in England, or rather at the court of the King, during the reign of Charles II.15 The sample is a happy one.
15 Cowley died in 1667, too early to have thoroughly imbibed the peculiarities of the "poets of the restoration," if he had remained in England before. But this was not the case; he was secretary to the Earl of St. Albans, in Paris, during the Protectorature, and there acquired these peculiarities.
"DRINKING.
| The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck from the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; The sea itself, (which one would think, Should have but little need of drink,) Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up, So filled that they o'erflow the cup. The busy sun, (and one would guess By his drunken, fiery face no less,) Drinks up the sea; and when he's done, The moon and stars drink up the sun: They drink and dance by their own light; They drink and revel all the night. Nothing in nature's sober found, But an eternal health goes round; Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high; Fill all the glasses there; for why Should every creature drink but I? Why, man of morals, tell me why?" |
The question in the last line, is easily answered. If in no other way, by the ridiculous death of Polycrates' minion, the immortal Anacreon, who lost his mortality through the agency of an ingrate grape stone.