nd.

Why should I then seek further store,
And still make love anew;
When change itself can give no more,
'Tis easie to be true.

It is like a cup of cold water after the didactic endearments of Adam,
and his repeated apostrophe:

Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve--
For such thou art, from sin and blame entire.

Then there was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was drunk for five
years on end,--so his biographer, who had it from his own lips,
alleges--and he died at the age of thirty-two. Like Sedley, he professes
no virtues, and holds no far-reaching views. But what a delicate turn of
personal affection he gives to the expression of his careless creed:--

The time that is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment's all my lot,
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
'Tis all that Heaven allows.

Rochester's best love-poetry reaches the topmost pinnacle of achievement
in that kind. None has ever been written more movingly beautiful than
this:--

When, wearied with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love and peace and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire!

Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest--
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven--
And lose my everlasting rest!

Or than that other piece (too beautiful and too intense to be cited as a
sudden illustration of a thesis) beginning--

Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?

The wind bloweth where it listeth; the wandering fire of song touches the
hearts and lips of whom it will. Milton built an altar in the name of the
Lord, and he made a great trench about the altar, and he put the wood in
order, and loaded the altar with rich exotic offerings, cassia and nard,
odorous gums and balm, and fruit burnished with golden rind. But the fire
from Heaven descended on the hastily piled altars of the sons of Belial,
and left Milton's gorgeous altar cold.

His fame is now old-established and settled, so there is no place left
for the eloquence of the memorialist, or the studied praises of the
pleader. I have tried to understand Milton; and have already praised him
as well as I know how,