As some way-faring man, passing a wood
(Whose waving top hath long a sea-mark stood,)
Goes jogging on, and in his mind nought hath
But how the primrose finely strews the path,
Or sweetest violets lay down their heads
At some tree's root.

GRAY.

Browne belongs to a class of writers whose influence is felt rather than seen: village brooks, whose course you trace by the greenness they diffuse. Drayton and Daniel deserve similar praise; though their intellectual powers were of a higher grade. In all Drayton's lighter poems you recognize the scholar of Spenser, his Quest of Cynthia for the play of fancy, the mirthfulness of manner, and the dance of the numbers, may be compared with Cowley's Chronicle. Daniel's principal charm is the wonderful purity of his diction; he will always be "well-languaged Daniel." You cannot study him too attentively; for a model more simple or idiomatic it would be vain to inquire. The following sonnet is elegant and musical; the ninth line rises into beauty.

I must not grieve, my love, whose eyes would read
Lines of delight whereon her youth might smile;
Flowers have time before they come to seed,
And she is young, and now must sport the while.

And sport, sweet maid, in season of these years,
And learn to gather flowers before they wither;
And where the sweetest blossom first appears,
Let love and youth conduct thy pleasures thither.
Lighten forth smiles to clear the clouded air,
And calm the tempest which my sighs do raise,
Pity and smiles do best become the fair;
Pity and smiles must only yield thee praise.
Make me to say, when all my griefs are gone,
Happy the heart that sigh'd for such an one.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my anguish and restore the light
With dark forgetting of my care, return—
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-advised youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torments of the night's untruth.
Cease dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

MASON.

Daniel justly prided himself upon his sonnets; Drayton, although inferior to his friend in the con

struction of this difficult poem, sometimes attained to great excellence. The images of Faith and Innocence in the following lines have a monumental repose, and the scene itself offers a beautiful design to the sculptor:

:

Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up
his eyes*.

If this fine description had been applied to the death-bed of a Christian, it would have been perfect of how much graceful poetry has that ponderous Poly-Olbion deprived us; notwithstanding the gleams of fancy that play over its pages, they are scarcely less difficult to penetrate than Storer's Life of Wolsey.

GRAY.

Before you sneer at Storer, try and beat these

verses:

I am that tomb where that affection lies

That was the closet where it living kept:

Yet wise men say affection never dies;

No, but it turns, and when it long hath slept,
Looks heavy like the eye that long hath wept.

* How pretty and fanciful is the description of Queen Isabella's hand:

So white, so soft, so delicate, so sleek,
As she had worn a lily for a glove.

Depend upon it, Caractacus contains nothing so good.

MASON.

Whom do you regard as the earliest English writer of a philosophic poem?

GRAY.

Sir John Davies, in his Nosce' Teipsum, the most perfect specimen of didactic reasoning in verse, before Pope. No one can read it without being struck by the rare economy of phrase, the strong yet finely wrought texture of the thoughts, and the extraordinary condensation of the language. When I speak of economy, I mean the economy of wealth. Davies had none of the indolence of a dreamer; all his imagery in intelligible. See by what a novel comparison, accurately worked out, he illustrates Sensitive Memory.

Here Sense's apprehension end doth take,
As when a stone is into water cast,

One circle doth another circle make,

Till the last circle touch the bank at last.

Jeremy Taylor, whose reading extended over the circle of literature and the sciences, appears to have had this stanza in his mind, while writing the

• Mason's well-known Tragedy.

following passage in the Great Exemplar, where the image is applied with great ingenuity. He is discoursing of the grace of God. "But as a

stone," he

"thrown into a river first moves says, the water, and disturbs its surface into a circle, and then its own force wafts the neighbouring drops into a larger figure by its proper weight; so is the grace of God the first principle of our spiritual motion, and when it moves us into its own figure, and hath actuated and ennobled our natural powers by the influence of that first incentive, we continue the motion and enlarge the progress. But as the circle on the face of the water grows weaker, till it hath smoothed itself into a natural and even current, unless the force be renewed or continued; so do all our natural endeavours, when first set on work by God's preventing grace, decline to the imperfection of its own kind, unless the same force be made energetical and operative, by the continuation and renewing of the same supernatural influence*." The description of Feeling is equally admirable:

Much like a subtle spider which doth sit

In middle of her web which spreadeth wide;
If ought do touch the utmost thread of it,
She feels it instantly on every side.

• Considerations upon the Epiphany.