"ten white nuns" of Elinda, as he'elsewhere terms the fingers

of a beauty.

"Thou snowy farm with thy five tenements!

Tell thy white mistress here was one

That call'd to pay his daily rents :

But she a gathering flow'rs and hearts is gone,
And thou left void to rude possession.

But grieve not, pretty Ermin cabinet,

Thy alabaster lady will come home;

If not, what tenant can there fit

The slender turnings of thy narrow room,
But must ejected be by his own doom.

Then give me leave to leave my rent with thee;
Five kisses, one unto a place:

For though the lute's too high for me,

Yet servants, knowing minikin nor base,
Are still allow'd to fiddle with the case."

Lovelace, whether he had experienced disappointment in his person or in that of some friend, writes with warm indignation against "the love of great ones." We quote some parts of rather a long poem on this subject, which are not without spirit and fire.

"The love of great ones! 'Tis a love
Gods are incapable to prove;

For where there is a joy uneven,'
There never, never can be heaven:
"Tis such a love as is not sent
To fiends as yet for punishment;
Ixion willingly doth feel

The gyre of his eternal wheel;

Nor would he now exchange his pain

For clouds and goddesses again.

Would'st thou with tempests lie? Then bow

To the rougher furrows of her brow;

Or make a thunder-bolt thy choice?
Then catch at her more fatal voice;
Or 'gender with the lightning? try
The subtler flashes of her eye."

He thus represents the woman of quality addressing her humble wooer.

"But we (defend us!) are divine

Female, but madam-born, and come.
From a right honourable womb:
Shall we then mingle with the base,
And bring a silver-tinsel race?
Whilst th' issue noble will not pass,
The gold allay'd, almost half brass,
And th' blood in each vein doth appear,
Part thick Boorein, part Lady Clear:
Like to the sordid insects sprung
From father sun, and mother dungeon!!
Yet lose we not the hold we have,
But faster grasp the trembling slave; i
Play at balloon with's heart, and wind
The strings like skeins; steal into his mind
Ten thousand hells, and feigned joys.

Far worse than they; whilst, like whipp'd boys,
After this scourge he's hush with toys.
This heard, sir, play still in her eyes,
And be a dying; live like flies
Caught by their angle-legs, and whom

The torch laughs piecemeal to consume."

The concluding stanza of a song, supposed to be sung by Orpheus lamenting the death of his wife, is very beautiful.

"Oh could you view the melody

Of ev'ry grace,

And music of her face,

You'd drop a tear;

Seeing more harmony

In her bright eye,
hear."*

Than now you

The following little ode, entitled The Rose, addressed to Lucasta, at least as much of it as we think worth extracting, possesses some elegance of diction, if nothing particularly new or beautiful in sentiment.

"Sweet, serene, sky-like flower,.....

Haste to adorn her bower:

"The light of love, the purity of grace,

The mind, the music breathing from her face;

The heart, whose softness harmonized the whole, &c.".

Bride of Abydos.

From thy long cloudy bed
Shoot forth thy damask head.

Vermillion ball that's given

From lip to lip in heaven:

Love's couch's coverlid:

Haste, haste, to make her bed.

See! rosy is her bower,

Her floor is all this flower;
Her bed a rosy nest,

By a bed of roses prest."

The posthumous poems, as we have already observed, are much inferior to those from which we have been quoting. We can, however, glean from them a small, though a very small, portion, which is worthy of being redeemed from oblivion.*

The first stanza of the song to the lover, representing the folly of his attempting to secure the affections of his mistress by gaudy dress, is worthy of the first Lucasta.

"Strive not, vain lover, to be fine,

Thy silk's the silk-worm's, and not thine;
You lessen to a fly your mistress' thought,
To think it may be in a cobweb caught.

What though her thin transparent lawn
Thy heart in a strong net hath drawn?
Not all the arms the god of fire ere made,
Can the soft bulwarks of naked love invade."

These lines taken from

others on many

66 a snail," are fan

ciful and elegant.

"Now hast thou chang'd thee, saint, and made

Thyself a fane that's cupola'd;

And in thy wreathed cloister thou

Walkest thine own grey friar too;

Strict, and lock'd up, thou'rt hood all o'er,

And ne'er eliminat'st thy door.

* This, however, has been already done, as far as a reprint can do it; in the very neat and elegant edition of the two Lucastas in Mr. Singer's early English poets. But the worthless too far overbalances the valuable in these poems to hope that general readers will have the patience to separate them.

On sallads thou dost feed severe,

And 'stead of beads thou drop'st a tear;
And when to rest, each calls the bell,
Thou sleep'st within thy marble cell;
Where, in dark contemplation plac'd,
The sweets of nature thou dost taste."

We We can also extract the more modest praises of "Love made in the first age," addressed to Chloris.

We must, however, here close our extracts, which have certainly occupied as much space as we can afford to the merits of Lovelace; which, though they are far from being of the highest order, amply deserve the notice we have been able to give him. Such poems as they are, they rather shew what the author might have been, had he lived in other circumstances, and at a very different period, than give that full and satisfactory gratification to be derived from the efforts of more genuine inspiration. In the songs, and in the other happy offspring of Lovelace's muse, it will have been observed, that his verse is commonly smooth and harmonious. This character, however, by no means applies to the whole of his poems, the greater part of which are written in a very crabbed and obscure style. It is to be remarked, that the smoothness and felicity of his verse almost always accompanies a proportionate happiness

of imagery and thought. When writing in the fashion of the times his lines are cold and constrained, often forced and unnatural; he appears hampered by confinement, and sings, to use his own phrase, though in a different application, "like a committed linnet;"—when he escapes from his thraldom, the gay air of a gallant high-thoughted cavalier graces every line. We will conclude this paper with a few scattered lines which we remarked in our perusal, but which, though worthy of notice, were not, for different reasons, of importance enough to be introduced, into the body of our extracts.

In the duel of the toad and spider, he speaks of a description of punishment more horrible than any other we remember to have heard of.

"Now as in witty torturing Spain,
The brain is vex'd, to vex the brain;
Where heretics' bare heads are arm'd
In a close helm, and in it charm'd
An overgrown and meagre rat,

That piecemeal nibbles himself fat."

In the triumphs of Philamore and Amoret, he has this finely expressed comparison.

"as at a coronation,

When noise, the guard, and trumpets are o'er-blown,

The silent commons mark their prince's way,

And with still reverence both look and

pray."

He compares a toad and a spider, about to engage with each other, in these terms.

"Have you not seen a carrack lie

A great cathedral in the sea,
Under whose Babylonian walls
A small thin frigate alms-house stalls;
So in his slime the toad doth float,

And th' spider by, but seems his boat."

Perhaps a black patch on a lady's cheek, covering a bee's sting, was never before mentioned in terms so exalted as the following.

"And that black marble tablet there,

So near her either sphere,

Was plac'd; nor foil, nor ornament,

But the sweet little bee's large monument.”