Ere God his wrath on Balaam wreaks, That, where his grace despised is grown, Neither Churchill nor Cowper ever wrote anything in the same style better than this. The modern air, too, of the whole, with the exception of a few words, is wonderful. But this, as we have said, is the character of all Wither's poetry of his earliest as well as of his latest. It is nowhere more conspicuous than in his early religious verses, especially in his collection entitled Songs and Hymns of the Church, first published in 1624. There is nothing of the kind in the language more perfectly beautiful than some of these. We subjoin two of them :— Thanksgiving for Seasonable Weather. Song 85. Lord, should the sun, the clouds, the wind, The air, and seasons be To us so froward and unkind As we are false to thee; All fruits would quite away be burned, Or lie in water drowned, Or blasted be or overturned, But from our duty though we swerve, And deign thy creatures to preserve, And thy displeasure gain, No sooner we to cry begin But pity we obtain. The weather now thou changed hast That put us late to fear, 1 For which, with lifted hands and eyes, To thee we do repay The due and willing sacrifice Of giving thanks to-day; To render thee be slow, Nor let that mercy be forgot Which thou art pleased to show. Thanksgiving for Victory. Song 88. To thee all praises do belong, And thou the God of Armies art. We must confess it is thy power That made us masters of the field; With fury came our armed foes, To blood and slaughter fiercely bent; And perils round did us inclose, By whatsoever way we went; That, hadst not thou our Captain been, We on the place had dead been seen, Or masked in blood and wounds had lain. This song we therefore sing to thee, As at this time and heretofore; BROWNE. ALONG with Wither ought to be mentioned a contemporary poet of a genius, or at least of a manner, in some respects kindred to his, and whose fate it has been to experience the same long neglect, William Browne, the author of Britannia's Pastorals, of which the first part was published in 1613, the second in 1616, and of The Shepherd's Pipe in Seven Eclogues, which appeared in 1614. Browne was a native of Tavistock in Devonshire, where he was born in 1590, and he is supposed to have died in 1645. It is remarkable that, if he lived to so late a date, he should not have written more than he appears to have done: the two parts of his Britannia's Pastorals were reprinted together in 1625; and a piece called The Inner Temple Masque, and a few short poems, were published for the first time in an edition of his works brought out, under the care of Dr. Farmer, in 1772; but the last thirty years of his life would seem, in so far as regards original production, to have been a blank. Yet a remarkable characteristic of his style, as well as of Wither's, is its ease and fluency; and it would appear, from what he says in one of the songs of his Pastorals, that he had written part of that work before he was twenty. His poetry certainly does not read as if its fountain would be apt soon to run dry. His facility of rhyming and command of harmonious expression are very great; and, within their proper sphere, his invention and fancy are also extremely active and fertile. His strength, however, lies chiefly in description, not the thing for which poetry or language is best fitted, and a species of writing which cannot be carried on long without becoming tiresome; he is also an elegant didactic declaimer; but of passion, or indeed of any breath of actual living humanity, his poetry has almost none. This, no doubt, was the cause of the neglect into which after a short time it was allowed to drop; and this limited quality of his genius may also very probably have been the reason why he so soon ceased to write and publish. From the time when religious and political contention began to wax high, in the latter years of King James, such poetry as Browne's had little chance of acceptance; from about that date Wither, as we have seen, who also had previously written his Shepherd's Hunting, and other similar pieces, took up a new strain; and Browne, if he was to continue to be listened to, must have done the same, which he either would not or could not. Yet, although without the versatility of Wither, and also with less vitality than Wither even in the kind of poetry which is common to the two, Browne rivals that writer both in the abundance of his poetic vein and the sweetness of his verse; and the English of the one has nearly all the purity, perspicuity, and unfading freshness of style which is so remarkable in the other. Here is a specimen from the reply of Remond to the love-tale of his brother-shepherd, in the first Song of the first Book of Britannia's Pastorals: Have thy stars malign been such, Which thy endeavours still doth countermand. For such an humour every woman seizeth, She loves not him that plaineth, but that pleaseth. When much thou lovest, most disdain comes on thee; And, when thou think'st to hold her, she flies from thee. And loveth best where she is hated most. 'Tis ever noted, both in maids and wives, Whose crafts and wiles did I intend to show, And dived themselves within the ocean, Love not still where thou may'st; love who loves thee; And, if she be not for thee, be not for her. If that she still be wavering, will away, Why should'st thou strive to hold what will not stay? Better to live by loss than die by suit. Favour and pity wait on patience; And hatred oft attendeth violence. If thou wilt get desire whence love hath pawned it, But can dissemble more than men their fire. Be never caught with looks, nor self-wrought rumour, If thou hast seen the beauty of our nation, And find'st her have no love, have thou no passion; May yield a face as fair, a love more pure. Leave, oh then leave, fond swain, this idle course; For love's a good no mortal wight can force. And here is another short extract from the second Song, exemplifying Browne's more habitual manner, on ground where all the descriptive poets have been competitors: Not all the ointments brought from Delos isle, Saffron confected in Cilicia; Nor that of quinces, nor of marjoram, That ever from the isle of Coös came: Nor these, nor any else, though ne'er so rare, |