That the large and intense homage of Davies (among his illustrious contemporaries), in these "Hymnes" was genuine not simulated, spontaneous not mercenary, the apostrophe to Envy protests. With an echo of the old 'exegi monumentum' or reminiscence of Shakespeare's then not long published Sonnets, he thus writes:-- Enuy, goe weepe; my Muse and I Laugh thee to scorne; thy feeble eye Is dazeled with the glory Shining in this gay poesie, And little golden story. Behold how my proud quill doth shed Eternall _nectar_ on her head; The pompe of coronation Hath not such power her fame to spread, As this my admiration. Respect my pen as free and franke Expecting not reward nor thanke, Great wonder onely moues it; I never made it mercenary, Nor should my Muse this burthen carrie As hyr'd, but that she loues it. (p. 154.) Then in "Orchestra" you are again and again reminded that, mere sport of wit though it be, "suddaine, rash, half-capreol of my wit," as he himself calls it to Martin (p. 159), it is a man of rare genius who sports. So much so that ever and anon you perceive, as Cleopatra of her Anthony: ------"his delights Were dolphin-like; _they show'd his tack above_ _The element they lived in_." (v. 2.) That is, even among the trivialities about 'Dauncing' and the frivolities of laudation, you are re-called to grander things--as in the Summer one sees breaks of blue in the over-arching sky above some miserable Pick-nick party desecrating some glorious forest-dell. I cull two out of manifold examples of the unexpectedness that I now wish to point out--as thus of the antiquity yet vitality of 'Dauncing':-- "Thus doth it equall age with age inioy, And yet in lustie youth for euer flowers; Like loue his sire, whom Paynters make a boy, Yet is the eldest of the heau'nly powers; Or like his brother Time, whose wingèd howers Going and comming will not let him dye, But still preserve him in his infancie." (p. 169.) That is 'brilliant' but this is 'great,' indeed magnificent, of the Sea:-- "Loe the _Sea_ that fleets about the Land, And like a girdle clips her solide waist, Musicke and measure both doth vnderstand; For his great chrystall eye is always cast Vp to the Moone, and on her fixèd fast; And as she daunceth in her pallid spheere, So daunceth he about her Center heere." (p. 179.) I know not where, outside of Milton, to match that personification of the Sea, with its "great chrystall eye"; and 'palid' is as tenderly delicate as the other is grand. Coleridge must have carried it in his omniverous memory, for surely one of the most memorable of the stanzas in his "Ancient Mariner" drew its inspiration thence, as thus:--