‘Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest,’
and next morning, perhaps, is off before breakfast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as destitute of imagination as his master.” It is the cheerful equanimity with which the older poets anticipated and endured some such finale as this which gives them their precise advantage over their more exacting and self-centred successors.
For what is the distinctive characteristic of the early love-songs, and to what do they owe their profound and penetrating charm? It is that quality of youth which Heine so subtly recognized in Rossini’s music, and which, to his world-worn ears, made it sweeter than more reflective and heavily burdened strains. Love was young when Herrick and Carew and Suckling went a-wooing; he has grown now to man’s estate, and the burdens of manhood have kept pace with his growing powers. It is no longer, as at the feast of Apollo, a contest for the deftest kiss, but a life-and-death struggle in that grim arena where passion and pain and sorrow contend for mastery.
“Ah! how sweet it is to love! Ah! how gay is young desire!”
sang Dryden, who, in truth, was neither sweet nor gay in his amorous outpourings, but who merely echoed the familiar sentiments of his youth. That sweetness and gayety of the past still linger, indeed, in some half-forgotten and wholly neglected verses which we have grown too careless or too cultivated to recall. We harden our hearts against such delicious trifling as
“The young May moon is beaming, love, The glow-worm’s lamp is gleaming, love.”
We will have none of its pleasant moral,--
“’Tis never too late for delight, my dear,”
and we will not even listen when Mr. Saintsbury tells us with sharp impatience that, in turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a great deal that we can ill afford to spare. The quality of youth is still more distinctly discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes’s dazzling little songs, stolen straight from the heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous with that golden light which set so long ago. It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that this resemblance exists; the words, the imagery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed from another age, and wandering companionless under alien skies. Some two hundred years before Beddoes’s birth, Drummond of Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the praises of his sweet mistress, dead on her wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty lines entreating for her favor:--