In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, revealing the finer grain of that impetuous soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the stormy waters of life. Whether we think of Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptuous court, or as dying of want in a cellar; whether we picture him as sighing at the feet of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country and his king; whether he is winning all hearts by the resistless charms of voice and presence, or returning broken from battle to suffer the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we know that in his two famous lyrics we possess the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, of that troubled and many-sided existence. A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, has been preserved from oblivion by a little wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good-natured contentment and disbelief that we grow young and cheerful again in contemplating it. Should any long-suffering reader desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth century--Mr. Browning’s word-picture of “A Pretty Woman,” for example--back to those swinging and jocund lines where Phillis, “Faithless as the winds or seas,” smiles furtively upon her suitor, whose clearsightedness avails him nothing, and who plays the game merrily to the end:-- “She deceiving, I believing, What need lovers wish for more?” We who read are very far from wishing for anything more. With the Ettrick Shepherd, we are fain to remember that old tunes, and old songs, and well-worn fancies are best fitted for so simple and so ancient a theme:-- “A’ the world has been in love at ae time or ither o’ its life, and kens best hoo to express its ain passion. What see you ever in love-sangs that’s at a’ new? Never ae single word. It’s just the same thing over again, like a vernal shower patterin’ amang the buddin’ words. But let the lines come sweetly, and saftly, and a wee wildly too, frae the lips of Genius, and they shall delight a’ mankind, and womankind too, without ever wearyin’ them, whether they be said or sung. But try to be original, to keep aff a’ that ever has been said afore, for fear o’ plagiarism, or in ambition o’ originality, and your poem ’ill be like a bit o’ ice that you hae taken into your mouth unawares for a lump o’ white sugar.” Burns’s unrivaled songs come the nearest, perhaps, to realizing this charming bit of description; and the Shepherd, anticipating Schopenhauer’s philosophy of love, is quite as prompt as Burns to declare its promise sweeter than its fulfillment:-- “Love is a soft, bright, balmy, tender, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which nature offers us in mockery, during a’ the rest o’ our lives, the puir, paltry, pitiful, fusionless, faded, cauldrified, and chittering substitute, Truth!”