Recurring to the comparison already touched upon, Cupid and Campaspe have not ceased to play their game of cards; while the admonition to Lesbia to “live and love” will continue to be current coin amid the “golden cadences” of all time. For,
“What to him is snow or rime, Who calls his love his own?”
It were difficult, in truth, to wrest from Waller his “girdle” of immortal fame, or for any twentieth-century laureate to excel Jonson’s spirited pledge, “To Celia,” or to vie with the sublime strain of Herrick’s “Bid me to live.” And who shall surpass the delicate lacelike grace of Lodge’s “Love in my bosom like a bee,” “My bonny lass! thine eye,” and his still more impassioned rendition of the charms of “Rosalind”?
Who, too, shall outsoar the plumèd flight of Heywood’s “Pack clouds away,” or transcend the birdlike carol of Davenant, “The lark now leaves his wat’ry nest”? And where shall we look for a rival to Marvell’s “Had we but world enough and time,” or the music and dainty conceit of Carew’s “Ask me no more where Jove bestows”? These, and how many, many more, pulsate with the sweetness and plaintiveness of a zither touched by master fingers. Reading them as they attune and chant themselves despite the lapse of centuries, they recall the picture Glapthorne so vividly depicts of a _Gentleman playing on the Lute_:--
“Whose numerous fingers whiter farre Than Venus swans or ermines are Wag’d with the amorous strings a Warre, But such a Warre as did invite The sense of Hearing, and the Sight To riot in a full delight.”
A review of the following pages, on the other hand, will disclose many a delicious wild-flower that, alike in form and hue, is a stranger to the gardens of the past. It is perhaps unfair to individualise; but for the sake of comparison solely, a few instances may be cited with no disparagement to the excellence of the whole of which they form a part. So far as musical sweetness of tone, elevated sentiment, and facility of rhythmic utterance are concerned, Tennyson and Swinburne stand unequalled in their special spheres. The short lyric, however, does not occur nearly as frequently with the latter as with the former, who abounds in pure love-lays, fluid and tender as a thrush’s song. What more fragrantly exquisite than “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,” or indeed the scores of _amoretti_ with which he has added to “golden numbers, golden numbers”! With Shakespeare and Milton a master of the sonnet, a large portion of Rossetti’s shorter pieces have been expressed in this his favourite vehicle of verse. Surely the music of song, even though it be in sonnet form, has not suffered a decline when such impassioned chords are heard as vibrate amid “The House of Life.” But acting on prescribed lines, the sonnet in consequence has been but sparingly employed in this collection.