O fountain Arethuse,' and thou honoured flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood:
But now my oat proceeds,

And listens to the herald of the sea

That came in Neptune's plea;

He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds,
What hard mishap had doomed this gentle swain?
And questioned every gust of rugged wings,
That blows from off each beaked promontory:
They knew not of his story,

And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon strayed,
The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters played.
It was that fatal and perfidious bark

Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Next Camus,3 reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge, Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.4 "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?" Last came, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake,5

1 Now Phœbus, whose strain was of a higher mood, has done speaking, he invokes the fountain Arethuse of Sicily, the country of Theocritus, and Mincius, the river of Mantua, Virgil's country, in compliment to those poets.

2 Eolus, the son of Hippotas.

3 The Cam, the river of Cambridge.

4 Meaning the hyacinth, the leaves of which were supposed to be marked with the mournful letters A, A. Cf. Ovid, Met. x. 210 sqq.

5 "The introduction of St. Peter after the fabulous deities of the sea, has appeared an incongruity deserving of censure to some admirers of this poem. It would be very reluctantly that we could abandon to this criticism the most splendid passage it presents. But the censure rests, as I think, on too narrow a principle. In narrative or dramatic poetry, where something like illusion or momentary belief is to be produced, the mind requires an objective possibility, a capacity of real existence, not only in all the separate portions of the imagined story, but in their coherency and relation to a common whole. Whatever is obviously incongruous, whatever shocks our previous knowledge of possibility, destroys, to a certain extent, that acquiescence in the fiction which it is the true business of the fiction to produce. But the case is not the same in such poems as Lycidas. They pretend to no credibility, they aim at no illusion, they are read

Two massy keys he bore, of metals twain (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain),

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake :

66

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest;

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least

That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs!

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel1 pipes of wretched straw;

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

99

But swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread :
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.'
Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; return Sicilian muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,

with the willing abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only that general possibility, that combination of images, which common experience does not reject as incompatible, without which the fancy of the poet would be only like that of the lunatic. And it had been so usual to blend sacred with mythological personages in allegory, that no one, probably, in Milton's age, would have heen struck by the objection."-Hallam.

1 Probably equivalent to the Latin "stridens," creaking, piercing.

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strow the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus1 old,
Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's2 hold;
Look homeward, angel now, and melt with ruth:3
And, O ye dolphins,1 waft the hapless youth.

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

Through the dear might of him that walked the waves,
Where other groves and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

1 Probably Bellerus, one of the Cornish giants, fabulously supposed to dwell at the Land's End.

2 A watch-tower and lighthouse formerly stood on the promontory called the Land's End, and looked, as Orosius says, towards another high tower at Brigantia in Gallicia, and consequently towards Bayona's Hold.-Newton.

3 Pity.

4 A dolphin is said to have carried the body of Palemon to the shore of Corinth, where he was deified.

Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more;
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray,
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue.
To morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new

XVIII.

THE FIFTH ODE OF HORACE, LIB. I.

["Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa," rendered almost word for word without rhyme, according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.]

WHAT slender youth, bedewed with liquid odours,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind'st thou

In wreaths thy golden hair,

Plain in thy neatness? Oh, how oft shall he
On faith and changed gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire!

Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold;
Who always vacant, always amiable,
Hopes thee, of flattering gales
Unmindful. Hapless they

To whom thou untried seem'st fair. Me in my vowed
Picture the sacred wall declares to have hung

My dank and dropping weeds

To the stern god of sea.

AD PYRRHAM. ODE V.

Horatius ex Pyrrhæ illecebris tanquam è naufragio enataverat, cujus amore irretitos, affirmat esse miseros.

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
Perfusus liquidis urget odoribus,
Grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
Cui flavam religas comam
Simplex munditiis? heu quoties fidem
Mutatosque deos flebit, et aspera
Nigris æquora ventis

Emirabitur insolens!

Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
Qui semper vacuam semper amabilem
Sperat, nescius auræ
Fallacis. Miseri quibus

Intentata nites. Me tabula sacer
Votiva paries indicat uvida
Suspendisse potenti
Vestimenta maris Deo.

XIX.

ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE UNDER
THE LONG PARLIAMENT.

BECAUSE you have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounced his liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred,
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword

To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rotherford?
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics

By shallow Edwards1 and Scotch what d'ye call:2

1 The author of the Gangræna (published in 1646), or "a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the errors, heresies, and blasphemies, and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years."-Thyer.

2 Possibly the famous Alexander Henderson, or George Gillespie, a Scotch minister and commissioner at Westminster.-Newton.