soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me."

The lyric, _Disdain Returned_, of the courtier, Thomas Carew, shows
both a customary type of subject and the serious application often
given:--

"He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from starlike eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,
As old time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away."

Carew could write with facility on the subjects in vogue at court, but
when he ventures afield in nature poetry, he makes the cuckoo
hibernate! In his poem _The Spring_, he says:--

"...wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy Cuckoo and the Humble-bee."

In these lines from his poem _Constancy_, Sir John Suckling shows
that he is a typical Cavalier love poet:--

"Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather."

From Richard Lovelace we have these exquisite lines written in
prison:--

"Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage."

To characterize the Cavalier school by one phrase, we might call them
lyrical poets in lighter vein. They usually wrote on such subjects as
the color in a maiden's cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days,
bridal cakes, the paleness of a lover, and--

"...wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink."

but sometimes weightier subjects were chosen, when these lighter
things failed to satisfy.

Religious Verse.--Three lyrical poets, George Herbert (1593-1633),
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), and Richard Crashaw (1612?-1650?), usually
chose religious subjects. George Herbert, a Cambridge graduate and
rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, wrote _The Temple_, a book of
religious verse. His best known poem is _Virtue_:--

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew shall weep the fall to night;
For thou must die."

The sentiment in these lines from his lyric _Providence_ has the
genuine Anglo-Saxon ring:--

"Hard things are glorious; easy things good cheap.
The common all men have; that which is rare,
Men therefore seek to have, and care to keep."

Henry Vaughan, an Oxford graduate and Welsh physician, shows the
influence of George Herbert. Vaughan would have been a great poet if
he could have maintained the elevation of these opening lines from
_The World_:--

"I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great rin