picture of the many spiritual subjects that have passed betwixt God and my soul," and requesting him to publish it or not as he saw fit. It appeared in 1633 shortly after Herbert's death, and at once took and retained a high place. The poem entitled The Collar, with its admirable force, truth, and passion, seems to point to one of those " spiritual conflicts" from which even the saintly Herbert tells us he was not exempt.

VERTUE.

=

94.-5. Angrie and brave. Angry red, the color of the face of one flushed with passion. Brave = splendid, gaudy,

etc.

THE ELIXIR.

95. An Elixir was, in alchemy, a substance supposed to possess the power of transmuting the baser metals into gold. Chaucer speaks of it as identical with the Philosopher's Stone, and the Great Elixir (or Philosopher's Stone) was also called the red tincture (see n. on l. 15).-1-8. Teach me, etc. The sense is: Teach me to see Thee in all things, and by making Thee first in every action thus give it his (i.e. its) perfection. In Herbert's time his was still commonly used where we should use its. (See Craik's English of Shakespeare, Rolfe's Ed. $54).-15. With his tincture. Tincture being here, as has been said, the same as the Elixir, the sense is, that there is no action however mean which, imbued or purified by his (i.e. its) tincture for Thy sake, will not grow bright. To do a thing as for Thee is to transmute the action from base metal to fine gold, and the talisman for Thy sake is the magic tincture or Elixir which can effect the change. (This passage is differently explained by Grosart, see his ed. of Herbert, I. 313.)—24. Told = counted. Cannot be counted less.

VAUGHAN.

97. In his love of nature, and his sense of the holiness of childhood with its mysterious nearness to the divine, Vaughan is the precursor of Wordsworth. The substantial identity between the fundamental thought in The Retreate and that of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (p. 318) has been often pointed out, and some have even claimed that the great ode was consciously based upon the earlier poem. For this, however, there seems to be no better authority than conjecture. The resemblances are undoubtedly striking.

COWLEY.

A VOTE.

101. The poem from which these verses are taken first appeared in the second edition of Cowley's volume of juvenile verse entitled Poetical Blossoms (1636). The entire poem consisted of eleven stanzas, of which the last three are given here. These stanzas were quoted by Cowley with some trifling changes in his essay Of Myself. He there alludes to the poem as an ode which I made when I was but thirteen years old." "The beginning of it," he adds, "is boyish: but of this part which I here set down (if a very little were corrected) I should hardly now be much ashamed." (See Cowley's Essays.)

THE GRASSHOPPER.

102. This is the tenth of a series of twelve short poems entitled Anacreontiques; or, Some Copies of Verses Translated Porophrastically out of Anacreon, which appeared at the end of the Miscellanies in the collection of Cowley's Poems of 1656. "Cowley," says Leslie Stephen, “can only be said to survive in the few pieces where he condescends to be unaffected." The selection here given is a good example of his simpler verse. (See "Cowley" in Gosse's Seventeenth-century Studies.)-8. Ganimed = Ganymede, the cup-bearer of Zeus.

LOVELACE.

TO ALTHEA FROM PRISON.

Lovelace,

105. This poem was composed in 1642 during the poet's confinement in the Gatehouse at Westminster. who was of Kentish family, had been chosen to present to Parliament a petition from the Kentish royalists on behalf of Charles I. The Parliament threw him into prison because of this advocacy of the royal cause.

HERRICK.

107. ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674), after being neglected for more than a century, has been given a high place among the lyrists of his time. Indeed within his own sphere, as laureate of pastoral England, and master of the lighter lyric, he has nothing to fear from comparison with the poets

of any period of the literature. The son of a London goldsmith, he came as a young man within the group that assembled round Jonson and was "sealed of the tribe of Ben." His presentation, in 1629, to the living of Dean Prior, near Ashburton, Devonshire, set him in the midst of that rural life in England that lives in so much of his best verse. Deprived of his living in 1647 because of his royalist sympathies, he returned to London, but was restored to his living in 1662, and died in 1674. King Oberon's Feast, the first of his poems to get into print, appeared in 1635, and his Hesperides, or the works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq., a collection containing many of his best-known poems, was published in 1648.

ARGUMENT TO HESPERIDES.

3. Hock-carts, the last carts to return from the fields at harvest-home. Perhaps from Hockey, Prov. Eng. for Harvest-home. For description of the ceremonies customary at harvest festivals, see Herrick's poem The Hock-cart, Hesperi des, No. 250.-3. Wassails. It was a rural custom to drink the health of or to Wassail, the fruit-trees on Christmas eve. Herrick alludes to this in his poem Ceremonies for Christmas, Hesperides, No. 786. For account of similar ceremonies practised in Devonshire, Herrick's county, on the eve of Epiphany, see also Chambers's Book of Days, I. 56.)—3. Wakes, originally festivals held in celebration of the dedication of a church, usually upon the day of the saint after whom the church was named later these festivals became county fairs but still retained the name of wakes (see Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, § XXVIII). A good notion of the appropriate ceremonies of May-day, the other country festival here alluded to, will be found in the next selection, Corinna Going a-Maying.-8. Times trans-shifting. Herrick wrote in a period of political change and excitement, but as his work is habitually removed from such matters, he probably refers here merely to the succession of the seasons.-12. The Court of Mab. The fairy Mab, popularly associated with dreams and nightmare. Although she is here said to have a court, the earliest known instance of her being called a Queen is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, I. 4. See Furness's n. on this passage in Variorium Ed., vol. 1. p. 61, and Milton's L'Allegro, 1. 101, and n.

WALLER.

ON A GIRDLE.

113.-6. The pale, etc. Pale is used for that which encompasses, as well as in the more ordinary sense of a fence or boundary, as of a park. The well-worn pun on deer, poor enough at best, is one of the few blemishes on the poem. The conceit shows that poor taste from which even the greatest Elizabethan poets are not exempt. Shakespeare himself makes this same wretched pun more than once.

ON THE FOREGOING DIVINE POEMS.

114. On the Foregoing Divine Poems, i.e. On Divine Love (1685) and The Fear of God (1686).-1. When we for age. If this was written in 1686, the date of the last poem above mentioned, Waller must have been eighty one years old at this time.-11. Clouds of Affection, i.e. clouds of passion, or the passing impulses and desires of youth. Affection was originally used in a bad as well as in a good sense. Here the sense is that the thronging desires and longings of youth hide that emptiness of life which age descries.

MILTON.

115. JOHN MILTON was born in 1608, or eight years after the death of Shakespeare and about twenty-three years before the birth of Dryden, -the next great master in the poetic succession. He lived until 1674, or fourteen years after the Restoration. He thus grew up and began to write during the latter years of the Elizabethan period; he was closely identified with almost the whole course of the Puritan struggle for civil and religious liberty, and he lived on, a sublime and solitary figure, into the midst of that new literary and social epoch which dates from the accession of Charles II. He was therefore contemporaneous with Suckling, Lovelace, Herbert, and the lyrists grouped together in the last section, although differing widely from them in his genius and work. Milton's literary career falls naturally into three well-marked divisions. 1st. MINOR POETIC PERIOD, cir. 1624-1638-40, which includes L'Allegro, ll Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and many of the short poems; 2d. PERIOD OF PROSE AND OF PAMPHLET WARFARE, cir. 1640-1660, which includes his controversial

writing, tracts, and a few sonnets, poetical translations, etc.; 3d. MAJOR POETIC PERIOD, cir. 1660-1674, the great period of Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained.

L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

These companion poems, written while Milton was living in his father's house at Horton, a village near Windsor,-or between about 1632-38,-are either studies of two contrasted characters, that of the mirthful and the meditative man, or, possibly, revelations of two contrasted moods felt by the same man at different times and under different circumstances. The two poems should consequently be read together and constantly compared. Dr. Garnett remarks that the poems are "complementary" rather than contrary, and in a sense may be regarded as one poem whose theme is the praise of the reasonable life. "Mirth has an undertone of gravity, and melancholy of cheerfulness. There is no antagonism between the states of mind depicted; and no rational lover, whether of contemplation or recreation, would find any difficulty in combining the two." (Life of Milton, G. W. S., p. 49.) The natural background in each poem, is skilfully harmonized with the general impression Milton wished to produce; that is, the aspects of Nature described in either case may be regarded either as informing us of the character and especial preferences of the speaker, if two distinct persons are portrayed,—or as indicating the scenes which are most conducive to, or in keeping with, the cheerful and the thoughtful mood. Dr. Johnson says: "The author's design is not, what Theobald has remarked, merely to show how objects derive their color from the mind by representing the operation of the same things upon the gay and the melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is differently disposed; but rather how, among the successive variety of appearances, every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which it may be gratified." ("Milton," Lives of the Poets (M. Arnold's ed.), p. 44.) Whatever view we take, the two poems should be read carefully for the light they throw on Milton himself at this period. A man's character can be inferred from his tastes, and as Milton's genius was not of that dramatic and objective quality which effaces the writer's personality in the portrayal of alien characters, we are justified in assuming that Milton himself really cared for those things-the stage, the cathedral, etc.-in which he makes the two speakers delight.

The sources of these poems have been discussed by the critics. It has been urged that the theme may have been suggested by certain portions of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy