A book of seventeenth century lyrics

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Preface

This book is made up of English lyrics which fall between the years 1625 and 1700. The first quarter of the seventeenth century is here unrepresented, because the lyrical poetry, like most other kinds of literature of that period, was produced under impulses and maintained by traditions almost wholly Elizabethan. The method pursued in the selection and arrangement of the poems constituting this book is much that of the editor's Elizabethan Lyrics. Some poems have been retained, the exclusion of which a standard of the highest literary and poetic worth might demand. This is justified by a recognition of the fact that a book such as this must be, to a certain extent, historically representative. The same requirement has prompted a rigid adherence to chronological order in the arrangemeat of material and to the rule that no poem shall appear except in its completeness and in that form in which it may reasonably be supposed to have had its author's maturest revision. The term lyric has necessarily been interpreted with some liberality in the consideration of a period which tended, towards its close, to the conscious exercise of artifice and wit in poetry rather than to the spontaneous expression of emotion. If Mr. Henley's recent enunciation of the essential antithesis between the lyric and the epigram is to be accepted in its rigor, many of the poems of this collection must fall under his ban.^ And

1 See the Introduction to Mr. Henley's collection of English Lyrics.

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yet much might be said — -were this the place for it — of the lyrical quality which frequently accompanies even the cynical gallantry and coxcombry of Suckling, Sedley, and Rochester. If poems such as many of theirs and of Dryden's be excluded from the category of the lyric on the score of artificiality or insincerity, they must assuredly be restored to their place for the power of music in them.

The poems in this book have been selected, not only from the works of the individual poets represented, but from contemporary poetical miscellanies and from the incidental lyrical verse contained in dramas, romances, and other works of the time. Care has been taken to make the text as correct as possible by a collation with authoritative sources ; and, wherever necessary, the sources of preferred readings will be found mentioned in the Notes. In the Introduction an attempt has been made to trace the course of English lyrical poetry during the period, to explain its relations to the previous age, and to trace the influences which determined its development and its final change of character. It is hoped that the Notes and Indexes may furnish the reader with such help as he may reasonably demand, and encourage the student to a deeper study of a rich and interesting period in one of its most distinctive forms of artistic expression.

In conclusion, I wish to record my recognition of a few amongst many favors. My acknowledgments are due here, as ever, to Dr. Horace Howard Furness for the loan of books and for much kind encouragement ; to Dr. Clarence G. Child, especially amongst my colleagues, for valuable suggestions and many services ; and above all to Professor Kittredge, one of the general editors of this series, whose wide learning and untiring care have been generously bestowed to better this book.

FELIX E. SCHELLING.

THE ENGLISH LYRIC OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.i

I

In the Introduction to A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics I have said that " not the least merit of EUzabethan literature, defining both words strictly, is its soundness and its health ; its very lapses from decorum are those of childhood, and its extravagances those of youth and heated blood, both as far as possible removed from the cold cynicism, the doubt of man and God, that crept into England in the train of King James, and came in time to chill and benumb the pulses of the nation."^

This statement I believe to be strictly and literally true, though it may here need some explanation. There was both crime and wickedness in Elizabeth's day ; there was virtue and nobility of life in the days of James. But a cleavage between art and morals had come about early in the seventeenth century, if indeed not before; the Renaissance, now somewhat spent and losing in freshness and virility, threw off its former alliance with the rude but wholesome ethical spirit which animated the drama during the lifetime of

1 The reader is referred to the earlier paragraphs of the Introduction to the editor's A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics for a general discussion of the nature and limitations of the term lyric.

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Shakespeare, and contracted from a broad humanitarian love of art as an imitation of the whole range of human action and emotion into the narrower, if choicer, spirit of the dilettante, whose taste in trifles is perfect, whose joy is not a little in the skill and cleverness of the artist, whose range for art, in a word, is contracted within the limits of good society. On the other hand, the moral aspect of the world was not lost, although it seemed all but lost to literature for a time. Any statement that the complex of moral, religious, and political agencies which is loosely called Puritanism was an unmixed evil to literature is wide of the truth. The marvellously rich devotional poetry of the period, a poetry which knew no sect and existed the common possession of Romanist, Churchman, and Dissenter, is alone a sufficient refutation of such an opinion. Still that spirit which translated the JQys of the world into vanities and denounced the most innocent show of human emotion as the lust of the flesh and the temptation of the devil withdrew itself apart and lived alone in later forms of Puritanism, which became stern and austere, unmollified by grace and unsweetened with charity.

Nothing could better illustrate the essential relation which exists in art between truth and that typical presentation of nature which we somewhat inaccurately call beauty, than the history of English poetry in the seventeenth century, especially the history of the lyric, always that form of poetry most sensitive to the subtler influences of an age. Moreover, whatever fastidious literary taste may prefer, the student of literature must beware of generalizations formed on anything short of a consideration of all the literary phenomena at hand. Perversions of art have their lesson for the historian of literature, and must be considered if the picture is to be true. Thus we must recognize, not only the rhetorical and " metaphysical " excesses of lesser and later Donnians, but

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the extraordinary stripping off of the gauds and ornaments of poetic diction which marks the work of Wither when he leaves the praises of Fair Virtue to sing hymns of diviner praise. No less must we take into account that one of the most remarkable and artistically perfect poems of Carew is unquotable to-day ; whilst it was not a mere following of the bad example which his master, Jon son, had set him in translating some of the more objectionable epigrams of Martial, which has given us, in Herrick, a garden of the Hesperides foul in places with the filth of the kennel. These things are not wholly to be laid to the score of coarse or unrestrained manners. The root of the matter is in this separation of the ethical from the aesthetic principle, a separation which produced in the one case the moral, but for the most part unillumined, verses of Quarles and Wither, and, in the other (with V much that was an aberration from both ethical and aesthetic ideals), the perfect Hedonistic lyrics of Carew and Herrick, ^ which exist for their beauty and for their beauty alone.

To consider the cult of beauty as a new thing in the poetry of any period would be as absurd as to assume, by the extension of a doctrine attributed by Walter Bagehot to Ulrici, a concealed and deadly moral purpose for*each and every poem of the earlier age.^ But if we will turn to the poetry of Spenser, Jonson, Donne, and Shakespeare we shall find it informed with an element of truth, whether half concealed in allegory, didactically paraded, intellectually subtilized, or set forth in an unerring justness of conception as to the dramatic relations of men to men. This we do not find in nearly an equal degree in the poetry of the succeeding age, and the ideals of such a poet as Carew -^ to take the most successful of his class — become much the same as those of the school which in our own day has given rise / to the phrase ''art for art's sake," a school accompanying

1 Shakespeare, Literary Studies, I, 169.

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whose aesthetic posturings we sooner or later behold the cynical leer of satire. Take the following :

If when the sun at noon displays

His brighter rays,

Thou but appear, He then, all pale with shame and fear,

Ouencheth his light.

Hides his dark brow, flies from thy sight

And grows more dim Compared to thee than stars to him.

If thou but show thy face again When darkness doth at midnight reign, The darkness flies, and light is hurled Round about the silent world : So as alike thou driv'st away Both light and darkness, night and day.^

This is beautiful and fanciful poetry. It is hyperbolic to a degree, so much so that we feel it to be no more than a figure of gallantry, the charming and perfectly expressed compliment of a courtly gentleman to a high-born and radiant beauty. In a poem of this kind we are not concerned with the truth ; indeed the truth might perhaps spoil the effect. There is nothing new in the idea, but the artist has daintily set it like a gem in the filigree of a carefully considered comparison. Romeo, under the quickening influence of a new and all-consuming passion, forged the same thought into a pregnant metaphor :

What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun !

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon. Who is already sick and pale with grief.

That thou her maid art far more fair than she.^

1 Poems of Thomas Carew, reprint of ed. 1640, Edinburgh, 1824, p. 8.

INTRODUCTION. xiii

The hyperbole of Romeo is justified by the overwrought emotion of the moment ; it stirs in the hearer a sympathy with the lover's passion. The hyperbole of Carew is no less justified, for it, too, arrives at its purpose, which is no more*' than to amuse. There is about it, from its very extravagance, a suspicion of delicate raillery, which becomes certain when the poet leaves us at the end with a charming paradox. She would have been but an unsophisticated maiden at court who could have taken such a fine compliment from the king's ^ cupbearer to figure forth anything more than " How pretty you 're looking this morning, my dear ! " .

" The artifice and machinery of rhetoric," says De Quincey, "furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure as any other; that the pleasure is of an inferior order, can no more attaint the idea or model of the composition, than it can impeach the excellence of an epigram that it is not a tragedy. Every species of composition is to be tried by its own laws."^ The much-vaunted test of comparison, by which Byron set beside Keats or Shelley appears tawdry or uninspired, is often preposterously misleading. There are reds that " kill " each other, though each may be beautiful apart ; the mood in which to read Horace may not be precisely the mood for Catullus. In the seventeenth^ century lyric and its overflow into the occasional verse of the day we have neither the universality of Shakespeare, the scope and majesty of Milton, nor the consummate constructive, if conventionalized, art of Dryden and Pope ; and yet there are some of us who feel that we could no more spare the dainty grace and beauty of Coriiina's Going A-Maying than we could endure to lose a book of Paradise Lost. To critics of the nature of William Hazlitt, in those unlucid intervals in which his prejudices stood all on end, such poets as Carew or Suckling are " delicate court triflers " and noth-

^ Rhetoric^ Historical Essays^ II, 229.

IXTRODUCTION.

ing more; to those who love the art of an intaglio or the deli-^ cate curves of a Grecian urn, and can admire either \vithout| stricture that it is not the Capitoline Jupiter, the best of thai poetry of the reign of Charles I seems to imply no decaying! school, but a height of lyric excellence combined with an \ exquisite workmanship which only the greatest poets of our day or of EHzabeth's have surpassed. ,

In its general characteristics the poetry of the seventeenth \ century, extending onward from the accession of Charles I, j \ is intensive rather than expansive, fanciful rather than imagi- !/ native, and increasingly restrictive in its range and appeal, until it comes at length to be the utterance of a single class of society.

The period in its earlier years was too close to that of Elizabeth and James not to feel the strong pulse and enthusiastic love of beauty which was theirs, and the great political events that made the seventeenth one of the most momentous centuries in the history of England kept men from falling too rapidly into the conventionalized conception of literature and life which came to prevail in the next century. It is precisely as we find a poet rising above these general qualities of narrow intensiveness, fantasticality of thought and expression, and class prejudice, that we recognize in him the special qualities that make him great. The aesthetic Milton, with the rich blood of the Renaissance tingling in his veins, bursts forth in the fine Ode on the Morning of Chrisfs Nativity and in the great "poetry which followed it. In his later poetical period too, it is his lofty artistic purpose and his ethical nobility which lift Milton out of his own time and convert him into a world poet, despite a certain hardness of spirit which bitter partizanship had fostered and which could not but grow out of the warring elements of his age in a nature so grave and stern. Thus again, a genuine love of nature unites such diverse names-

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as those of Vaughan, Marvell, and Cotton, the last especially delighting in the sensuous enjoyment of pleasant sight and soothing sound. In Marvell is added to an artistic touch a moral rectitude that at once dignifies his poetry and gives it a distinguished place in literature ; whilst Vaughan, added to a religious fervor which he shares with Herbert and Crashaw, but in differing mode, displays, in his tenderness for natural objects, a spiritual contemplativeness which every now and then flashes a revealing light upon the relation of man to the universe. Herrick, in his humaneness, in his artless delight in those small things which go so far to make up our daily life, Carew, in the sincerity of his workmanship and in his artistic propriety, rise above the temporary conventions of a single age, and become, each in his own way, poets fraught with a message to following times.

II

That the poets of the reigns of James and Charles I wrote ^ under the combined influences of Ben Jonson and Donne, and that the older influence of Spenser continued to animate poet after poet, has been repeated again and again, and may be accepted as substantially true. It seems well, under the circumstances, briefly to consider wherein these influences really consisted, less in their abstract principles than in the manner in which the ideals of each great poet manifested themselves in his work, and especially in their subsequent effects on his followers. What may be called the manner of Spenser (i.e., Spenser's way of imitating and interpreting nature artistically by means of poetic expression) may be summarized as consisting of a sensuous love of beauty combined with a power of elaborated pictorial representation, a use of classical imagery for decorative effect, a fondness for melody, a flowing sweetness, naturalness and continuousness

X vi INTR on uc riON.

of diction amounting to diffuseness at times, the diffuseness of a fragrant, beautiful, flowering vine. We may say of the poets that employ this manner that they are worshippers of beauty rather than students of beauty's laws ; ornate in their expression of the type, dwelling on detail in thought and image lovingly elaborated and sweetly prolonged. To such artists it is no matter if a play have five acts or twenty-five, if an epic ever come to an end, or if consistency of parts exist; rapt in the joy of gentle onward motion, in the elevation of pure poetic thought, even the subject ceases to be of much import, if it but furnish the channel in which the bright, limpid liquid continues musically to flow.

Besides his pastorals, Drayton Spenserized the enormous Polyolbion. The Fletchers followed with subjects theological and anatomical also allegorized after the manner of Spenser. But the poetry of none of these need concern us here : not even the beautiful later pastorals of Wither and Browne. For, Drayton aside, the last two poets are the only followers of Spenser who have achieved the unity and repression of a successful lyric ; and by the accession of King Charles, Browne had ceased to write, and Wither had already straggled off into his innumerable devotional pamphlets, verse and prose, in which were much fibre and many tendrils, but little bloom. In the period with which this book is concerned the direct influence of Spenser is chiefly to be found in the earlier poetry of Milton, which, despite its remarkable originality and the traces of other influences than this, exhibits in the main the distinctive " notes " of Spenserianism, restrained by a chaster taste and by a spirit profoundly imbued with the classics.

As Milton is chief amongst the poets included in this book, it cannot be wide of our purpose to stop in our discussion to consider these Spenserian " notes " in his earlier poetry. Take the following :

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Gejiius. Stay, gentle swains, for, though in this disguise, I see bright honor sparkle through your eyes ; Of famous Arcady ye are, and sprung Of that renowned flood, so often sung, Divine Alpheus, who, by secret sluice, Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse ; And ye, the breathing roses of the wood, Fair silver-buskined Nymphs, as great and good. I know this quest of yours and free intent Was all in honor and devotion meant To the great mistress of yon princely shrine, Whom with low reverence I adore as mine.

And with all helpful service will comply To further this night's glad solemnity.

And lead ye where ye may more near behold What shallow-searching Fame hath left untold; Which I full oft, amidst these shades alone. Have sat to wonder at, and gaze upon.

This is early work of Milton and exhibits nearly every one of the "notes" mentioned above, — sweetness, melody, naturalness, continuousness in metre and sense, personification : "What shallow-searching Fame hath left untold"; classical allusion : Arcady, Alpheus, Arethusa, " Fair silver-buskined Nymphs." A use of nature for decorative effect pervades the whole passage. For pictorial vividness, in which however Milton never surpassed his master, we must look to other passages. A more striking example of some of these qualities of Milton's earlier poetry will be found in the famous song from Comtis, Sabrinafairi^. 38, below, vv.9-32), wherein we have almost a complete list of the ancient deities of the sea from "great Oceanus " to "fair Ligea's golden comb." Some of the allusions of this song (e.g., " the Carpathian wizard's hook " y we may suspect were not altogether luminous to the casual reader of Milton's own day, despite his " greater

1 See note on this passage, p. 243, below.

xviii INTRODUCTION.

wont " in the classics. Milton's evident delight in passages such as this is made up of two elements : first, a sensuous love of musical sound, the mingled charm of sonorous classical words and their unusual effect in the contrast of their English setting ; and, secondly, the scholar's satisfaction — pedantic in a lesser man — in lavishing his learning on his verse : for Milton possessed to the full the scholar's consciousness in the practice of his art. In view of the rhetorical finish of Milton's poetry, and the high sense of constructiveness which informs his work in even its apparently most unpremeditated flights, especially in view of the carefully wrought and subtly varied cadences of his blank verse, I do not feel certain that the customary classification of Milton with the poets of the past age, rather than with his actual contemporaries, is a classification wholly to be justified.

If now we turn to the poetry of Ben Jonson, more especially to his lyrical verse, the first thing that we note is a sense of form, not merely in detail and transition like the " links . . . bright and even " of The Faery Queen, but a sense of the entire poem in its relation to its parts. This sense involves brevity and condensity of expression, a feeling on the part of the poet that the effect maybe spoiled by a word too much — a feeling which no true Spenserian ever knew. There is about this poetry a sense of finish rather than of elaboration ; it is less continuous than complete ; more concentrated, less diffuse ; chaste rather than florid ; controlled, and yet not always less spontaneous ; reserved, and yet not always less natural. There are other things to note in the Jonsonian manner. It retained classical allusion less for the sake of embellishment than as an atmosphere — to borrow a term from the nomenclature of art. Its drafts upon ancient mythology become allusive, and the effects produced by Horace, Catullus, or Anacreon are essayed in reproduction under

INTRODUCTION. xix

English conditions. Not less eager in the pursuit of beauty \ than the Spenserian, the manner of Jonson seeks to realize ; her perfections by means of constructive excellence, not by entranced passion. It concerns itself with choiceness in diction, selectiveness in style, with the repression of wander- , ing ideas and loosely conceived figures — in a word, the manner of Jonson involves classicality.

Into the nature of the poetry of Donne I need not enter at length here. It is sufficient for our purposes to remember that the tokens of the presence of Donne consist in an excessive subjectivity that involves at times all but a total oblivion to the forms of the outward, visible world ; a disregard of the tried and conventional imagery and classical reference of the day, and the substitution for it of images of abstraction derived from contemporary philosophy and science ; an habitual transmutation of emotion into terms of the intellect ; and an analytic presentation and handling of theme, involving great rhetorical, and at times dialectic skill. To these qualities must be added a successful inventive ingenuity in the device of metrical effects, which despised tradition ; and, most important of all, a power in dealing with the abstract relations of things which raises Donne, in his possession of the rare quality, poetic insight, at times to a poet of the first order.

Thus we find Spenser and Jonson standing as exponents, / respectively, of the expansive or romantic movement and the repressive or classical spirit. In a different line of distinction Donne is equally in contrast with Spenser, as the intensive or subjective artist. Both are romanticists, in that each seeks to produce the effect demanded of art by means of an appeal to the sense of novelty ; but Spenser's romanticism is that of selection, which choo!^es from the outer world the fitting and the pleasing and coJy|||£ts it into a permanent artistic joy; Donne's is the roil^^icism of insight, which,

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looking inward, descries the subtle relations of things and transfigures them with a sudden and unexpected flood of light. Between Jonson and Donne there is the kinship of intellectuality ; between Spenser and Donne the kinship of romanticism ; between Spenser and Jonson the kinship of the poet's joy in beauty. Spenser is the most objective, and therefore allegorical and at times mystical; Jonson is the most artistic, and therefore the most logical ; Donne is the most subjective and the most spiritual.

III

In the year 1625 many traces of the poetry of the last century remained, especially in the lyric. The impetus which had been given by Lyly and Shakespeare to the writing of lyrical verse to be set to music in the incidental songs of the drama continued in the dramatists Dekker, Fletcher, Massinger, and Jonson himself. All carried on their own earlier practice, Ford and Shirley following. These last two poets have left lyrics scarcely less beautiful than the best of the earlier age ; whilst not a few of the minor playwrights, Thomas May, Thomas Goffe, Richard Brome, Thomas Randolph, even Aurelian Townsend, have reached distinction in individual instances. The popularity of song books continued throughout the century, but we have no work in this field approaching the poetry of Campion. The general character of collections such as his, which offered original words with original music, was maintained in the various works of Wilson, Henry and William Lawes, Lanier, Playford, D'Urfey, and many others. The poetical miscellany held its popularity in collections of very mixed quality, from sacred or secular lyrical poetry to the satirical broadside or book of jests and coarse epigra^|^^ Some of these books contain gleanings from the bes^p^ts of the day, but the general

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quality of the lyrical poetry therein is far inferior to similar productions in the preceding reigns, as the popular taste had turned from sentiment and poetry to the wit and ribaldry of the tavern.^

At the accession of Charles, Ben Jonson had twelve years . yet to live ; and, although his best work was now done, his position as the great literary dictator, with the added sanction of court patronage, produced a powerful effect upon the imaginations of scholarly and courtly young men. Poets and dramatists spoke of themselves as " sons of Ben," delighting in his society while he lived, and honoring his memory when he died. Six months after his death a volume appeared, entitled Jonsonus Virbius^ in which peers and commons, bishops and laymen united to celebrate in verses English, Latin, and Greek, the greatness of the deceased laureate, and to express the esteem and veneration in which they held him as a man.^ English literature knows no other such tribute ; it is above many monuments. Let us glance at the contributors to Jonsonus Virbiiis^ for among them are some of the most characteristic, if not the greatest, of the " sons of Ben." First is the amiable and accomplished Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, in bravery, courtesy, loyalty, all but literature — although a graceful poet — the Sidney of his age ; next, the genial and kindly Henry King, later Bishop of Chichester, author of the best lines of the volume ; Thomas May, Shak-

1 The quantity of this " literature " is very great, and much of it has little but an historical and social value. One of the most characteristic collections is Wifs Recreations^ first published in 1641, and going through nearly a dozen editions before the close of the century. Other miscellanies were Wit Restored^ Wit and Drollery, The Loyal Garland, The Muses^ Recreation. The song books of the period begin with Hilton's Book of Airs, 1627, and extend through innumerable songs, airs, and dialogues to Dr. Purcell's Collection of Airs, 1697.

'^ fonsonus Virbiiis is reprinted J^ the collected editions of Jonson by Whalley, Gifford, and Cunningham.* xxii I.VTR OD UC TION.

erley Marmion, Jasper Mayne, and William Cartwright, all dramatists of repute, some of them writing into Restoration times, the last a consummate master of panegyric and a lyric and elegiac poet after the manner of his other master, Donne. James Howell, the author of the charming Epistolac Ho-Eliajiae^ long intimate with Jonson, contributes a few lines ; as do John Clieveland, the trenchant loyalist satirist ; Sir John Beaumont, cousin of the dramatist, a poet chiefly by kinship ; Habington, author of Castara ; and Buckhurst, descendant of the author of Gorboduc, and father of Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, the courtly poet of the next reign. John Ford, the great dramatist, writes as an equal, not as a " son "; and last comes Edmund Waller, whose contact with earlier poetry is generally forgotten in the fact that he is the historical link between the lyric of Jonson and that of the Restoration. Shirley, the last illustrious name of the old drama, does not appear ; although a friend of Ford, he was probably without the charmed circle. Neither Herrick nor Carew contribute, though the former, certainly a veritable ''son," as several of his poems attest, was now a recluse in "loathed Devonshire"; whilst Carew, an older man, whose occasional verses show close intimacy with Jonson, was to survive but two years.^

If now we look into the contents of a volume of one of these "sons of Ben," we shall find that he has followed his master alike in the diversity and in the limitations of his art. He may give a greater preponderance to one species of verse, but he tries all — drama, the poetical epistle, epigram, lyric song and ode, commendatory verse, prologue and epilogue. The sonnets, pastorals, and madrigals of the past age have been superseded, despite the fact that Habington