How gently she would have fulfilled these last sad duties had the discriminating fates called her to his bier; how fragrant the sighs she would have wafted in that darkened chamber; how sincere the temperate sorrow for a remediable loss! And then, out into the glowing sunlight, where life is sweet, and the world exults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, and, underneath the scattered primrose blossoms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their graves. What gives to the old love-songs their peculiar felicity, their undecaying brightness, is this constant sounding of a personal note; this artless candor with which we are taken by the hand and led straight into the lady’s presence, are bidden to admire her beauty and her wit, are freely reminded of her faults and her caprices, and are taught, with many a sigh and tear, and laughter bubbling throughout all, what a delicious and unprofitable pastime is the love-making of a poet. “I lose but what was never mine,” sings Carew with gay philosophy, contemplating the perfidious withdrawal of Celia’s kindness; and after worshiping hotly at her shrine, and calling on all the winds of heaven to witness his desires, he accepts his defeat with undimmed brow, and with melodious frankness returns the false one her disdain:-- “No tears, Celia, now shall win My resolved heart to return; I have searched thy soul within, And find naught but pride and scorn. I have learned thy arts, and now Can disdain as much as thou.” From which heroic altitude we see him presently descending to protest with smiling lips that love shall part with his arrows and the doves of Venus with their pretty wings, that the sun shall fade and the stars fall blinking from the skies, that heaven shall lose its delights and hell its torments, that the very fish shall burn in the cool waters of the ocean, if he forsakes or neglects his Celia’s embraces.