is not in the first. Nor has any one since attempted to supply the
deficiency,[2] though that benefactor of the lovers of Caroline
poetry, Mr. J. R. Tutin, included a fifteen-page selection of King's
poems, with Donne and Walton, in one of his 'Orinda Booklets'
(Hull, 1904) some little time after the plan of this collection was
announced, and when its first volume was passing through the press.
There must have been many readers who, like the present writer long
enough ago, have felt a sensation of mingled amazement and chagrin on
buying Dr. Hannah's book and _not_ finding 'Tell me no more' in it.
For that poem, though in certain 'strange and high' qualities it is
the inferior of the best jets of the Caroline genius, is one of the
most faultless and perfect things in this or indeed in any period of
English poetry, and may be said to impart the Caroline essence in a
form that can be (in the medical sense) 'borne' by all who have any
feeling for poetry at all, as hardly anything else does. It enlists,
with unerring art, the peculiar virtue of the metre--that of
expressing settled but not violent hopelessness--which Cowper
afterwards utilized, more terribly but hardly more skilfully, in
'The Castaway'. It has the 'metaphysical' fancifulness of thought and
diction, tempered to a reasonable but not an excessive degree 'below
proof' and so fit for general consumption. No one who possesses
literary 'curiosity'--in the good old sense, not the degenerate modern
one--can be indifferent to seeing what else the author of this could
do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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