Campion’s ‘airs,’ for which he wrote his words, laid rules too urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, ‘touching in its majesty’— ‘Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!’ Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are speechless, with these two final lines— ‘If speech be then the best of graces, Doe it not in slumber smother!’ Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines. ‘Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me’ is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in this— ‘Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!’ And a single joy in this— ‘Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!’ Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion the author of _Cherry Ripe_— ‘A thousand cherubim fly in her looks.’ And yet ‘a thousand cherubim’ is a line of a poem full of the dullest kind of reasoning—curious matter for music—and of the intricate knotting of what is a very simple thread of thought. It was therefore no easy matter to choose something of Campion’s for a collection of the finest work. For an historical book of representative poetry the question would be easy enough, for there Campion should appear by his glorious lyric, _Cherry Ripe_, by one or two poems of profounder imagination (however imperfect), and by a madrigal written for the music (however the stanzas may flag in their quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics for the sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity of the inspiration, and the poet’s absolute disregard of the moment of its flight and departure. A few splendid lines may be reason enough for extracting a short poem, but must not be made to bear too great a burden. WHEN THOU MUST HOME.—Page 50. Of the quality of this imaginative lyric there is no doubt. It is fine throughout, as we confess even after the greatness of the opening:— ‘When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admired guest—’