An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses.George Herbert was maladroit in using the word "rest" in two senses."Peace" is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the place of "rest" in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity.The poem is otherwise perfect beyond description.
MISERY
George Herbert's work is so perfectly a box where thoughts "compacted lie," that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this -"He was a garden in a Paradise." THE ROSEThere is nothing else of Waller's fine enough to be admitted here; and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class.Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third rank is less than great.The wearied argument of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: "Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love." This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was--time out of mind--unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity.The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning.There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief--and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.
L'ALLEGRO
The sock represents the stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy.Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic.The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.
IL PENSEROSO
It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian.Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.
LYCIDAS
Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of poetry.The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to Cornwall.Deva is the Dee; "the great vision" means the apparition of the Archangel, St.Michael, at St.Michael's Mount; Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land's End.
Arethusa and Mincius--Sicilian and Italian streams--represent the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.
ON A PRAYER-BOOK
"Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for a brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own verses.In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line -"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,"and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word to blame him with.They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace, of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century-- not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no reader of taste could suffer them.A better opinion on that company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest and exactest laws of temperance and measure.The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to call a "rage," and this expatiated (to use another word of their own) beyond all bounds.Of sheervoluntary extremes it is not in the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an eighteenth century "rage." A "noble rage," properly provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run upon.He was fancy's child, and the bard of the eighteenth century was the child of common sense with straws in his hair--vainly arranged there.The eighteenth century was never content with a moderate mind; it invented "rage"; it matched rage with a flagrant diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacant and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be behind no century in passion--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations.Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, "where to rage"; and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of misgiving as to the resulting verse.Take such a phrase as "the madded land"; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage as the last century evoked it."The madded land" is a phrase intended to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodge the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred."And dubious title shakes the madded land." It would be hard to find anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.
