But to return from this apparent digression; as the most beautiful pearls are often found in the roughest shells, so in the songs of Carew the reader will oftentimes be delighted to discover rare conceits, sparkling with wit, and genuine poetry, but incased in rough inharmonious verse. But often, as in the beautiful lines to a primrose, Carew seems to break loose from the trammels that fettered the versification of his day, and in tuneful, and well measured song expresses so aptly the ideas of his muse, as to give peculiar softness to his rhyme. That little song, To a Primrose, commencing, Ask me why I bring you here This firstling of the infant year. And the one entitled The Compliment, My dearest I shall grieve thee When I swear, yet, sweet, believe me, are almost equal in beauty to that exquisite song of Fletcher’s, commencing Take, oh, take those lips away. Or that complimentary song of Sir John Suckling’s, beginning Her cheeks so rare a white was on, No daisy bears comparison, Who sees it, is undone For streaks of red were mingled there Such as are on a Catharine pear, The side that’s next the sun. In all the poetry of the age in which Carew flourished, there is to be found a straining after resemblances, and too often the sense is sacrificed in the effort; personification is too often used, without judgment, or taste. It is this fault which, more than any other, has called down upon the poets of the age in which Carew flourished, so much severe, and oftentimes unjust criticism. But without offering these songs of Carew as models, without denying that according to the rigid canons of polished criticism, many glaring faults may be found in them, we still insist that their beauties are many, and to the eye, which brings not every thing to the narrow measure of a stern critic’s scrutiny, will more than compensate for unquestioned blemishes. The blemishes are the offspring of the distorted taste of the age in which our poet flourished—their beauties, the triumph of the poet’s genius over the difficulties in his pathway. THE SPRING.