Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

Thy arts are catching; cozen Satan too;
Thou hast a trick more than he ever knew;
He ne'er was atheist yet; persuade him to 't;
The schismatics will back thee, horse and foot.

We may notice that in one of his prose pieces The Character of a London Diurnal,' Cleveland introduces other personal peculiarities of Cromwell besides his fiery nasal organ. "This Cromwell," he observes, "is never so valorous as when he is making speeches for the Association; which, nevertheless, he doth, somewhat ominously, with his neck awry, holding up his ear as if he expected Mahomet's pigeon to come and prompt him. He should be a bird of prey, too, by his bloody beak ;" &c. It is probable enough that this attitude of one threading a needle, or trying to look round a corner, may have been customary with Cromwell in speaking at the early date to which the description refers, as it appears to have been with his sect in general: in another poem Cleveland depicts the Puritan preacher as

With face and fashion to be known

For one of sure election;

With eyes all white, and many a groan;
With neck aside, to draw in tone;
With harp in 's nose, &c.

WITHER.

These last mentioned writers-Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Denham, and Cleveland-were all, as we have seen, cavaliers; but the cause of puritanism and the parliament had also its poets as well as that of love and loyalty. Of these the two most eminent were Marvel and Wither. Marvel's era, however, is rather after the Restoration. George Wither, who was born in 1588,

covers nearly eighty years of the seventeenth century with his life, and not very far from sixty with his works : his first publication, his volume of satires entitled 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' having appeared in 1611, and some of his last pieces only a short time before his death in 1667. The entire number of his separate works, as they have been reckoned up by modern bibliographers, exceeds a hundred. Two songs or short poems of Wither's inserted by Percy in his Reliques*—the one beginning Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Cause another's rosy are?

Be she fairer than the day,

Or the flowery meads in May;
If she be not so to me,

What care I how fair she be?

-the other, entitled 'The Stedfast Shepherd,' an exquisitely graceful as well as high-thoughted carol, first recalled attention to this forgotten writer; his high merits were a few years afterwards more fully illustrated by Mr. Octavius Gilchrist in the Gentleman's Magazine; and he was subsequently made more widely known by the specimens of him given by Ellis,―among the rest the passage of consummate beauty (previously quoted by Gilchrist) from his Shepherd's Hunting, published in 1615, while he was confined in the Marshalsea, in which, breaking out into what we may call a hymn or pæan of gratitude and affection, he recounts all that Poetry and his Muse still were and had ever been to him :

In my former days of bliss

Her divine skill taught me this,—

Vol. iii. pp. 190 and 264.

That from every thing I saw
I could some invention draw,
And raise pleasure to her height
Through the meanest object's sight.
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rusteling;
By a daisy, whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man.
By her help I also now

Make this churlish place allow
Some things that may sweeten gladness
In the very gall of sadness.

The dull loneness, the black shade,
That these hanging vaults have made;
The strange music of the waves
Beating on these hollow caves;
This black den, which rocks emboss,
Overgrown with eldest moss;
The rude portals, that give sight
More to terror than delight;
This my chamber of neglect,
Walled about with disrespect;
From all these, and this dull air,
A fit object for despair,

She hath taught me by her might
To draw comfort and delight.
Therefore, thou best earthly bliss,
I will cherish thee for this,-
Poesy!-thou sweet'st content
That e'er heaven to mortals lent.
Though they as a trifle leave thee

Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee;

Though thou be to them a scorn

That to nought but earth are born;

Let my life no longer be

Than I am in love with thee.

Though our wise ones call thee madness,

Let me never taste of gladness

If I love not thy maddest fits
More than all their greatest wits.
And, though some, too seeming holy,
Do account thy raptures folly,

Thou dost teach me to contemn

What makes knaves and fools of them.

One excellence for which all Wither's writings are eminent, his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His unaffected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it, but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill. As a specimen of his clear and easy narrative style, we will transcribe a few passages from the Introduction to his 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' in which, by way of explaining the occasion of the work, he relates the history of his life to that date. After telling us that he had been well grounded at school in the Latin and Greek grammar, he proceeds to give an account of his first experience of Oxford :

It is the spring of knowledge, that imparts
A thousand several sciences and arts;
A pure clear fount, whose water is by odds
Far sweeter than the nectar of the gods;
Or, for to give 't a title that befits,

It is the very nursery of wits.

There once arrived, 'cause my wits were raw,
I fell to wondering at each thing I saw;
And for my learning made a month's vacation
In noting of the place's situation;

The palaces and temples that were due
Unto the wise Minerva's hallowed crew;
Their cloisters, walks, and groves.
But, having this experience, and withal
Gotten some practice at the tennis ball,
My tutor, telling me I was not sent

To have my time there vain and idly spent,

[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »