erilla

"Wind me in that very sheet
Which wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst implore
The gods' protection but the night before:
Follow me weeping to my turf, and there
Let fall a primrose and with it a tear;
Then lastly, let some weekly strewings be
Devoted to the memory of me.
_Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep_
_Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep;_"

or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style--

"In this world, _the Isle of Dreams_,
While we sit by sorrow's streams,
Tears and terrors are our themes;"

when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to,
of which he has almost the secret, cries

"_Oh, love me then, and now begin it,_
_Let us not lose this present minute;_
_For time and age will work that wrack_
_Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;_"

when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in this
splendid sally--

"So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea,
A star about the Arctic circle may
Than ours yield clearer light; _yet that but shall_
_Serve at the frozen pilot's funeral_:"

when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks,--the
fire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most careless
and unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into those
perfect verses which hardly even Burns and Shelley have equalled since,--it
is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than
appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatest
poets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so often
cause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicity
of language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem so
easy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of a
sensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the loftiest
spirituality.

When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found to
be based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-driven
metaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period of
literature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, they
are said to be "decadence," "autumn," "over-ripe fruit," "sunset," and so
forth. These pretty analogies have done much harm in litera