lyrical children, complained Sir John Suckling, with trouble and pain, instead of with that light-hearted spontaneity which distinguished his contemporaries, and which made their poetry so deliciously easy to write, and so generally unprofitable to read. Suckling himself, and Lovelace, and the host of courtly writers who toyed so gracefully and so joyously with their art, ignored for the most part all severity of workmanship, and made it their especial pride to compose with gentlemanly ease. The result may be seen in a mass of half-forgotten rubbish, and in a few incomparable songs, which are as fresh and lovely to-day as when they first rang the praises of Lucasta, or the fair Althea, or Chloris, the favorite daughter of wanton Aphrodite. They are the models for all love-songs and for all time, and, in their delicate beauty, they endure like fragile pieces of porcelain, to prove how light a thing can bear the weight of immortality. We cannot surpass them, we cannot steal their vivacious grace, we cannot feel ourselves first in a field where such delicious and unapproachable things have been already whispered. “Ah! frustrés par les anciens hommes, Nous sentons le regret jaloux, Qu’ils aient été ce que nous sommes, Qu’ils aient eu nos cœurs avant nous.” The best love-poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amply fulfill the requirements suggested by Southey: their sentiment is always “necessary, and voluptuous, and right.” They are no “made-dishes at the Muses’ banquet,” but each one appears as the embodiment of a passing emotion. In those three faultless little verses “Going to the Wars,” a single thought is presented us,--regretful love made heroic by the loyal farewell of the soldier suitor:-- “Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I flee. “True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field, And, with a stronger faith, embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. “Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore,-- I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.” In the still more beautiful lines, “To Althea from Prison,” passion, made dignified by suffering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, happy with his chains:-- “If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.”