Come, I say, thou powerful god,
And thy leaden charming-rod,
Dipt in the Lethean lake,

O'er his wakeful temples shake,
Lest he should sleep and never wake.

Nature, alas! why art thou so
Obliged to thy greatest foe?
Sleep that is thy best repast,

Yet of death it bears a taste,

And both are the same thing at last.

FROM THE 'ELEGY ON COWLEY.'

Old Chaucer, like the morning-star,
To us discovers day from far;

His light those mists and clouds dissolved
Which our dark nation long involved;
But he descending to the shades,
Darkness again the age invades.
Next, like Aurora, Spenser rose
Whose purple blush the day foreshows.
The other three, with his own fires,
Phoebus, the poets' god, inspires ;

By Shakespeare's, Jonson's, Fletcher's lines
Our stage's lustre Rome's outshines.
These poets near our princes sleep,
And in one grave their mansion keep;
They lived to see so many days,

Till time had blasted all their bays;

But cursed be the fatal hour

That plucked the fairest, sweetest flower
That in the Muses' garden grew,

And amongst withered laurels threw.

Time, which made them their fame outlive,
To Cowley scarce did ripeness give.
Old mother-wit and nature gave

Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;

In Spenser and in Jonson art
Of slower nature got the start;
But both in him so equal are,

None knows which bears the happiest share ;
To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he wrote was all his own.

He melted not the ancient gold,

Nor, with Ben Jonson, did make bold
To plunder all the Roman stores
Of poets and of orators.

Horace's wit and Virgil's state

He did not steal, but emulate,

And when he would like them appear,
Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear;
He not from Rome alone, but Greece,
Like Jason brought the golden fleece;
To him that language, though to none
Of th' others, as his own was known.
On a stiff gale, as Flaccus sings,
The Theban swan extends his wings,
When through the ethereal clouds he flies,
To the same pitch our swan doth rise.
Old Pindar's flights by him are reached,
When on that gale his wings are stretched.
His fancy and his judgment such,
Each to the other seemed too much,

His severe judgment, giving law,

His modest fancy, kept in awe,

As rigid husbands jealous are

When they believe their wives too fair.

THOMAS STANLEY.

[THOMAS STANLEY was born at Cumberlow, in Hertfordshire, in 1625, and died in Suffolk Street, London, on the 12th of April, 1678. His translations appeared in 1649 and his original poems in 1651.]

Eminent among the scholars of the Restoration as the historian of Philosophy and the expounder of Aeschylus, Stanley had dedicated his youth to studies less severe, and is now principally remembered as the last of the old school of lyrists. Born into a younger generation than that of Waller and Denham, he really belongs, as a poet, to the age before them, and in him the series of writers called 'Metaphysical' closes. Stanley is without the faults or the merits of his predecessors. His conceits are never violent or crude, though often insipid: but he has no flashes of music or sudden inspired felicities. He is a tamer and duller Herrick, resembling that writer in his versification, and following him at a distance in temperament and tone. Stanley was a very delicate and poetical translator; and he had the originality to select the authors from whom he translated according to his own native bias. He delighted in Moschus and Ausonius among the ancients, and in Joannes Secundus and Ronsard among the moderns; the world in which his fancy loved to wander was one of refined Arcadian beauty, rather chilly and autumnal, but inhabited by groups of nymphs and shepherds, who hung garlands of flowers on votive urns, or took hands in stately pensive dances. In no poet of the century is the negative quality of shrinking from ugliness and coarseness so defined as in Stanley. He constantly sacrifices strength to it, not as Habington sometimes did, from instinctive reticence and modesty of fancy, but from sheer over-refinement. Stanley makes a strange figure among the rough prosaic writers of the Restoration, and no poems of his have been preserved, except those of his youth. He probably ceased to write, and gave his intellect to less shifting studies, when he found the whole temper of the nation obstinately set against his inclination. He died in middle life, just when Lee and Otway were at the height of their vogue, and a few weeks before another great tradition in English poetry ceased at the death of Marvell.

EDMUND W. GOSSE.

CELIA SINGING.

Roses in breathing forth their scent,
Or stars their borrowed ornament,
Nymphs in the watery sphere that move,
Or angels in their orbs above,

The winged chariot of the light,
Or the slow silent wheels of night,

The shade which from the swifter sun
Doth in a circular motion run,

Or souls that their eternal rest do keep,
Make far less noise than Celia's breath in sleep.

But if the Angel, which inspires
This subtle flame with active fires,

Should mould this breath to words, and those
Into a harmony dispose,

The music of this heavenly sphere
Would steal each soul out at the ear,
And into plants and stones infuse

A life that Cherubim would choose,

And with new powers invert the laws of fate,
Kill those that live, and dead things animate.

THE TOMB.

When, cruel fair one, I am slain
By thy disdain,

And, as a trophy of thy scorn,

To some old tomb am borne,
Thy fetters must their power bequeath
To those of Death;

Nor can thy flame immortal burn,
Like monumental fires within an urn;

Thus freed from thy proud empire, I shall prove

There is more liberty in Death than Love.

And when forsaken lovers come

To see my tomb,

Take heed thou mix not with the crowd

And, as a victor, proud

To view the spoils thy beauty made
Press near my shade,

Lest thy too cruel breath or name
Should fan my ashes back into a flame,
And thou, devoured by this revengeful fire,
His sacrifice, who died as thine, expire.

But if cold earth or marble must
Conceal my dust,

Whilst hid in some dark ruins, I
Dumb and forgotten lie,
The pride of all thy victory

Will sleep with me;

And they who should attest thy glory, Will, or forget, or not believe this story. Then to increase thy triumph, let me rest,

Since by thine eye slain, buried in thy breast.