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Keep still in my horizon; for to me
The sun makes not the day, but Thee.
Thou whose nature cannot sleep,
On my temples sentry keep!
Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes,
Whose eyes are open while mine close;
Let no dreams my head infest,
But such as Jacob's temples blest.
While I do rest, my soul advance;
Make my sleep a holy trance,
That I may, my rest being wrought,
Awake into some holy thought;
And with as active vigor run
My course as doth the nimble sun.
Sleep is a death; oh! make me try,
By sleeping, what it is to die:
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe'er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.

These are my drowsy days; in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:

Oh! come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake forever.

Edmund Waller.

Waller (1605-1687) flourished under the rule of Charles I. and Charles II. His mother was aunt of the celebrated John Hampden, who was first cousin both of Edmund Waller and Oliver Cromwell. Rich an well-born, Waller was educated at Eton, and became a member of Parliament at eighteen. His political life was eventful, and not wholly to his credit. He sat in all the parliaments of Charles II., and was the delight of the House: even at eighty years of age he was the liveliest and wittiest man within its walls. His verses are smooth and polished, but superficial. Overpraised in his day, his fame has, not undeservedly, declined. He was left heir to an estate of £3500 in his infancy, and was either a Roundhead or a Royalist, as the time served. At twenty-five he married a rich heiress of London, who died the same year. Easy and witty, he was yet cold and selfish.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung

In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of Beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die, that she

The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee:

How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

ON A GIRDLE.

That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples biud:
No monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this has done.

It was my heaven's extremest sphere, The pale which held that lovely deer; My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, Did all within this circle move.

A narrow compass, and yet there
Dwelt all that's good and all that's fair:
Give me but what this riband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round.

William Habington.

Habington (1605-1645) was a Roman Catholic. He was educated at St. Omer's and Paris, and after his return to England married the lady who is the "Castara" of his volume of poems. He had no stormy passions to agitate him, no unruly imagination to control. His verses are often of a placid, tender, elegant description, but studded with conceits.

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Ye glorious wonders of the skies!

Shine still, bright stars,

The Almighty's mystic characters! I'd not your beauteous lights surprise To illuminate a woman's eyes.

Nor to perfume her veins will I
In each one set

The purple of the violet:

The untouched flowers may grow and die Safe from my fancy's injury.

Open my lips, great God! and then

I'll soar above

The humble flight of carnal love: Upward to thee I'll force my pen, And trace no paths of vulgar men.

For what can our uubounded souls
Worthy to be

Their object find, excepting thee?
Where can I fix? since time controls
Our pride, whose motion all things rolls.

Should I myself ingratiate

To a prince's smile,

How soon may death my hopes beguile! And should I farm the proudest state, I'm tenant to uncertain fate.

If I court gold, will it not rust?

And if my love

Toward a female beauty move, How will that surfeit of our lust Distaste us when resolved to dust!

But thou, eternal banquet! where
Forever we

May feed without satiety!

Who harmony art to the ear,

Who art, while all things else appear!

While up to thee I shoot my flame,

Thou dost dispense

A holy death, that murders sense, And makes me scorn all pomps that aim At other triumphs than thy name.

It crowns me with a victory

So heavenly, all

That's earth from me away doth fall: And I, from my corruption free, Grow in my vows even part of thee.

John Milton.

Milton (1608-1674) was the younger son of a London scrivener in good circumstances. At sixteen he entered Christ's College, Cambridge; taking his degree of M.A. in 1632, about which time he wrote "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Comus," "Lycidas," and other of his shorter poems. Afterward he travelled in Italy for some fifteen months, and visited blind old Galileo. Returning to England, he kept school for awhile. He strongly advocated the Republican cause, and, on the death of Charles I., was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State. At the Restoration he retired into private life; and it was then, in his old age, when he had become totally blind, that he wrote his immortal poems, "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained."

Milton was married three times-first, in 1643, to Mary Powell. It was a hasty marriage, and an unhappy one. Six years after her death he was united to Catherine Woodcock, with whom he lived happily for a year, when, to his great grief, she died. It is of her he speaks in one of his sonnets as "his late espoused saint." In 1660 he married Elizabeth Minshull, who proved an excellent wife. Milton's English sonnets, seventeen in number, are happily described by Wordsworth as "soulanimating strains, alas! too few." Johnson, however, could not see their grandeur, and explained what he considered Milton's "failure" by remarking to Hannah More, "Milton's was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherrystones." In his youth Milton was remarkable for his beauty of countenance. His life was the pattern of simplicity and purity, almost to austerity. He acted from his youth as "under his great Taskmaster's eye."

Milton's two juvenile poems, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," hardly deserve the reputation they have long held. He evidently took his hints for them partly from a forgotten pocm prefixed to Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," and partly from the song, by Beaumont and Fletcher, "Hence, all you vain delights!" (which see). The poem in Burton's book has these lines:

"When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of diverse things foreknown;

When I build castles in the air,

Void of sorrow, void of fear,

Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time ruus very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly;

Naught so sweet as Melancholy!"

The remainder of the poem is still more suggestive of resemblance, both in the measure and the general tone. The following tribute to the nobility of Milton's character is paid by Macaulay: "If ever despondency and asperity could be excused in any man, it might have been excused in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience." The fame of this eminent poet seems to have been undisturbed by the lapse of time.

L'ALLEGRO.1

Hence, loathéd Melancholy,

Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born!

In Stygian cave forlorn,

'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,

Find out some uncouth cell,

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings;

There, under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks,

In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.

2

But come, thou goddess, fair and free,
In heaven y-cleped Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth !
Whom lovely Venus at a birth,
With two sister Graces more,
To ivy-crownéd Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as some sages sing)

The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing-
As he met her once a-Maying-
There, on beds of violets blue,

And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,
Filled her with thee, a daughter fair,
So buxom, blithe, and debonair.

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity,

Quips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and wreathéd Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek ;-
Sport, that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it, as you go,
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honor due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,

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Through the sweet-brier, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine;'

While the cock, with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack or the barn-door
Stoutly struts his dames before;—
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumbering Morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill;
Some time walking, not unseen,
By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
Where the great sun begins his state,
Robed in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight;
While the ploughman near at hand
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures, Whilst the landscape round it measures: Russet lawns and fallows gray,

Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The laboring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where, perhaps, some beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Hard by a cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis, met,
Are at their savory dinner set,
Of herbs and other country messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses:
And then in haste her bower she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;
Or, if the earlier season lead

To the tanned hay-cock in the mead,
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks' sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the checkered shade;

1 Warton says: "Sweetbrier and eglantine are the same plant by the 'twisted eglantine' he therefore means the honeysuckle." 2 A sort of fiddle.

And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday,

Till the livelong daylight fail;—
Then to the spicy nut-brown ale,
With stories told of many a feat,
How fairy Mab the junkets eat;

She was pinched and pulled, she said,
And he by friars' lanthorn led;
Tells how the drudging goblin sweat
To earn his cream-bowl duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-laborers could not end;
Then lies him down, the lubber fiend!
And, stretched out all the chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And, crop-full, out-of-doors he flings
Ere the first cock his matin rings.
Thus done the tales, to bed they creep,
By whispering winds soon lulled to sleep.
Towered cities please us then,

And the busy hum of men,

Where throngs of knights and barons bold
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,-
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit or arms, while both contend

To win her grace whom all commend.
There let Hymen oft appear,

In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask and antique pageantry;
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.

And ever against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,

Such as the meeting soul may pierce;
In notes with many a winding bout'
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed and giddy cunning
The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony,-
That Orpheus' self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed

Of heaped Elysian flowers, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto to have quite set free

His half-regained Eurydice.

These delights if thou canst give, Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

IL PENSEROSO.1

Hence, vain, deluding joys,

The brood of folly, without father bred! How little you bestead,

Or fill the fixéd mind with all your toys! Dwell in some idle brain,

And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sunbeams, Or likest hovering dreams,

The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train.
But hail, thou goddess, sage and holy!
Hail, divinest Melancholy!

Whose saintly visage is too bright

To hit the sense of human sight,

And therefore to our weaker view
O'erlaid with black, staid wisdom's hue;
Black, but such as in esteem
Prince Memuon's sister might beseem,
Or that starred Ethiop queen that strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea-nymphs, and their powers offended:
Yet thou art higher far descended;
Thee bright-haired Vesta, long of yore,
To solitary Saturn bore;

His daughter she (in Saturn's reign,
Such mixture was not held a stain):
Oft in glimmering bowers and glades
He met her, and in secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,
While yet there was no fear of Jove.

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of cypress' lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step, and musing gait,
And looks commércing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:

1 A fold or twist.

1 The melancholy man.

2 A thin transparent texture.

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