the feeling and versification foreshadow much later and better work. But few readers can now do more than remember having heard the four lines to the Thames which express the poet's vain aspiration: O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full. Denham lived on Cooper's Hill, at Ankerwyke Purnish, three miles from Windsor; his contemporary, Edmund Waller, at Hall Barn at Beaconsfield, ten miles away; Milton at Horton and Chalfont; Pope stayed at Binfield, and, sixty years after Denham's poem, wrote his _Windsor Forest_. With all his asseveration he does nothing to convince us that he was ever at Windsor, or that, if so, he was glad to be there. It is hard to believe that a lover of trees wrote: Let old Arcadia boast her ample plain, Th' immortal huntress, and her virgin train; Nor envy, Windsor! since thy shades have seen As bright a Goddess, and as chaste a Queen; Whose care, like hers, protects the sylvan reign, The Earth's fair light, and Empress of the main. He alludes to Queen Anne. The greater part of the poem is in a language no longer intelligible, and it should be remembered it was written at the time when Windsor Park began to be what it now is. I recognize the same familiar strangeness in the style of an anonymous poet who described a stag chase in Windsor Forest in 1739. That Frederick, Prince of Wales, was his theme did not daunt but inspired him, and he says: Round Frederick's Brows their Crowns let Dryads wreath, Hence taught to grasp at Dangers, Wounds, and Death. This was a language not only praised by Swift as well as by later critics, but then commonly understood, though there is no proof that it was ever spoken. It is fairly certain that an anonymous poet of 1708 represented some inner truth and vision, now alas! irrecoverable, by the words in his "Windsor Castle": Beneath this Palace flows fair Thames's Streams, Where spreading Elms shade from the Sun's hot Beams; Where beauteous Sea-Nymphs on the Waters sport, And bulky Tritons grace the splendid Court. For him Queen Anne was like the sun, and he believed that: Clouds with mourning Sables deck'd the Skies, Till Anna like another Sun did rise. If we take "Queen Anne" as being the equivalent of "Sun", it may still be possible to make out the cipher which he and Pope used so mysteriously.