and so on, but instead,
‘A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I would trust,
Yet never link’d with error find—
‘One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthen’d honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose.’
So Bedingfield, conceding to friend Damon ‘the nymph that sparkles in her dress,’ avows his own fondness for the maid ‘whose cheeks the hand of Nature paints.’ Of this young person he says:
‘No art she knows or seeks to know;
No charm to wealthy pride will owe;
No gems, no gold she needs to wear;
She shines intrinsically fair.’
Cowley, it will be remembered, in sketching his notion of true happiness, included in it the picture of
‘A mistress moderately fair,
And good as guardian angels are,
Only beloved and loving me!’
With that ‘one dear She’—and a few other things—he thought he could get on pretty comfortably. But probably at once the most obliging and most exigent of modern lovers was the sentimental gentleman to whose feelings Mrs. Bowen-Graves (‘Stella’) gave appropriate voice in the over-familiar ‘My Queen.’
‘I will not dream of her tall and stately—
She that I love may be fairy light;’
nay, more:
‘I will not say she should walk sedately—
Whatever she does, it will sure be right.
‘And she may be humble or proud, my lady,
Or that sweet calm which is just between’