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In more than one place Lucasta’s, or Amarantha’s, or Laura’s hair is sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in Wordsworth’s line.

Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow a book; yet it is but a “hermitage.” To shake out the light and spirit of its leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him, but to the world.

In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, “you” to “thou.” Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and the inconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else so distressing as in this brief and otherwise perfect poem. The fault is easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lend him this redress, offered him here as an act of comradeship.

LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES

That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend upon the precision of a comma–nay, upon the precision of the voice in reading. Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem that makes a kind of dainty confusion between the two vestals–the living and the dead; they are “equal virgins,” and you must assign the pronouns carefully to either as you read. This, read twice, must surely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings. It is a joy to meet such a phrase as “her brave eyes.”

TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON

This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight. Should they be “birds” or “gods” that wanton in the air in the first of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at “gods,” and with admirable judgment suggested “birds,” an amendment adopted by the greater number of succeeding editors, until one or two wished for the other phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace. But the Bishop’s misgiving was after all justified by one of the Mss. of the poem, in which the “gods” proved to be “birds” long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with “gods” would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace led from birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels.

“When linnet-like confined” is another modern reading. “When, like committed linnets,” daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored; happily, because Lovelace would not have the word “confined” twice in this little poem.

A HORATIAN ODE

“He earned the glorious name,” says a biographer of Andrew Marvell (editing an issue of that poet’s works which certainly has its faults), “of the British Aristides.” The portly dulness of the mind that could make such a phrase, and having made, award it, is not, in fairness, to affect a reader’s thought of Marvell himself nor even of his time. Under correction, I should think that the award was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve of the day that cumbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burden and made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell’s political rectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a robustious kind; but his poetry, at its rare best, has a “wild civility,” which might puzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success of this phrase of the “British Aristides.” Nay, it is difficult not to think that Marvell too, who was “of middling stature, roundish- faced, cherry-cheeked,” a healthy and active rather than a spiritual Aristides, might himself have been somewhat taken by surprise at the encounters of so subtle a muse. He, as a garden- poet, expected the accustomed Muse to lurk about the fountain- heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the statues of the gods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century convention in which there were certainly no surprises. And for fear of the commonplaces of those visits, Marvell sometimes outdoes the whole company of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy. The reader treads with him a “maze” most resolutely intricate, and is more than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzled on the way to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought.