The busy lark, the messenger of day,
Saleweth[146] in her song the morrow gray;
And fiery Phœbus riseth up so bright,
That all the orient laugheth of the sight;
And with his stremès drieth in the greves[147]
The silver droppès hanging in the leaves;
And Arcite, that is in the court real[148]
With Theseus the squier principal,
Is risen, and looketh on the merry day;
And for to do his observance to May,
Remembring on the point of his desire,
He on the courser, starting as the fire;
Is risen to the fieldès him to play,
Out of the court, were it a mile or tway.
And to the grove, of which that I you told,
By àventure his way he gan to hold,
To maken him a garland of the greves,
Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leaves,
And loud he sung against the sunny sheen:
“O May, with all thy flowers and thy green,
Right welcome be thou, fairè freshè May:
I hope that I some green here getten may.”
And from his courser, with a lusty heart,
Into the grove full hastily he start,
And in a path he roamed up and down.
Dryden falls short in the freshness and feeling of the sentiment. His lines are beautiful; but they do not come home to us with so happy and cordial a face. Here they are. The word morning in the first line, as it is repeated in the second, we are bound to consider as a slip of the pen; perhaps for mounting.
The morning-lark, the messenger of day,
Saluteth in her song the morning gray;
And soon the sun arose with beams so bright,
That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight
He with his tepid rays the rose renews,
And licks the drooping leaves, and dries the dews;
When Arcite left his bed, resolv’d to pay
Observance to the month of merry May:
Forth on his fiery steed betimes he rode,
That scarcely prints the turf on which he trod:
At ease he seemed, and prancing o’er the plains,
Turned only to the grove his horses’ reins,
The grove I named before; and, lighted there,
A woodbine garland sought to crown his hair
Then turned his face against the rising day,
And raised his voice to welcome in the May
“For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear,
If not the first, the fairest of the year:
For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours,
And Nature’s ready pencil paints the flowers:
When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun
The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on.
So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight,
Nor goats with venom’d teeth thy tendrils bite,
As thou shalt guide my wandering steps to find
The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind.”
His vows address’d, within the grove he stray’d.
“How poor,” says Mr. Hunt, “is this to Arcite’s leaping from his courser ‘with a lusty heart.’ How inferior the common-place of the ‘fiery steed,’ which need not involve any actual notion in the writer’s mind, to the courser ‘starting as the fire;’—how inferior the turning his face to ‘the rising day,’ and ‘raising his voice,’ to the singing ‘loud against the sunny sheen;’ and lastly, the whole learned invocation and adjuration of May, about guiding his ‘wandering steps’ and ‘so may thy tender blossoms’ &c. to the call upon the fair fresh May, ending with that simple, quick-hearted line, in which he hopes he shall get ‘some green here;’ a touch in the happiest taste of the Italian vivacity. Dryden’s genius, for the most part, wanted faith in nature. It was too gross and sophisticate. There was as much difference between him and his original, as between a hot noon in perukes at St. James’s, and one of Chaucer’s lounges on the grass, of a May morning. All this worship of May is over now. There is no issuing forth in glad companies to gather boughs; no adorning of houses with ‘the flowery spoil;’ no songs, no dances, no village sports and coronations, no courtly-poetries, no sense and acknowledgment of the quiet presence of nature, in grove or glade.
O dolce primavera, o fior novelli,
O aure o arboscelli, o fresche erbette,
O piagge benedette, o colli o monti,
O valli o fiumi o fonti o verde rivi,
Palme lauri ed olive, edere e mirti;
O gloriosi spirti de gli boschi;
O Eco, o antri foschi o chiare linfe,
O faretrate ninfe o agresti Pani,
O Satiri e Silvani, o Fauni e Driadi,
Naiadi ed Amadriadi, o Semidee,
Oreadi e Napee,—or siete sole.
Sannazzar.
O thou delicious spring, O ye new flowers,
O airs, O youngling bowers; fresh thickening grass,
And plains beneath heaven’s face; O hills and mountains,
Vallies, and streams, and fountains; banks of green,
Myrtles, and palms serene, ivies, and bays;
And ye who warmed old lays, spirits o’ the woods,
Echoes, and solitudes, and lakes of light;
O quivered virgins bright, Pans rustical,
Satyrs and Sylvans all, Dryads, and ye
That up the mountains be; and ye beneath
In meadow or flowery heath,—ye are alone.
“This time two hundred years ago, our ancestors were all anticipating their May holidays. Bigotry came in, and frowned them away; then debauchery, and identified all pleasure with the town; then avarice, and we have ever since been mistaking the means for the end.—Fortunately, it does not follow, that we shall continue to do so. Commerce, while it thinks it is only exchanging commodities, is helping to diffuse knowledge. All other gains,—all selfish and extravagant systems of acquisition,—tend to over-do themselves, and to topple down by their own undiffused magnitude. The world, as it learns other things, may learn not to confound the means with the end, or at least,(to speak more philosophically,) a really poor means with a really richer. The veriest cricket-player on a green has as sufficient a quantity of excitement, as a fundholder or a partizan; and health, and spirits, and manliness to boot. Knowledge may go on; must do so, from necessity; and should do so, for the ends we speak of: but knowledge, so far from being incompatible with simplicity of pleasures, is the quickest to perceive its wealth. Chaucer would lie for hours looking at the daisies. Scipio and Lælius could amuse themselves with making ducks and drakes on the water. Epaminondas, the greatest of all the active spirits of Greece, was a flute-player and dancer. Alfred the Great could act the whole part of a minstrel. Epicurus taught the riches of temperance and intellectual pleasure in a garden. The other philosophers of his country walked between heaven and earth in the colloquial bowers of Academus; and ‘the wisest heart of Solomon,’ who found every thing vain because he was a king, has left us panegyrics on the spring and ‘the voice of the turtle,’ because he was a poet, a lover, and a wise man.”[149]
Aubrey remarks, that he never remembers to have seen a Maypole in France; but he says, “in Holland, they have their May-booms, which are streight young trees, set up; and at Woodstock, in Oxon, they every May-eve goe into the parke, and fetch away a number of hawthorne-trees, which they set before their dores: ’tis pity that they make such a destruction of so fine a tree.”