scientific wits as unnatural as a Sibyllic intoxication. He
strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range; but
within these, he is for the most part as happy as Herrick, as mellow as
Henry King, as free as Carew, and as capable as these were, and as those
deeper natures, Crashaw and Vaughan, were not, of a short poem perfect
throughout. He is the child of his age, moreover, in that his ingenuity
never slumbers, and his speech must ever be concise and knotty. If he
sports in the tangles of Neraea's hair, it is because he likes tangles,
and means to add to them. No Carolian poet was ever an idler!

Carew, perhaps, is Stanley's nearest parallel. The latter shows the very
same sort of golden pertness, masked in languid elegance, which goes to
unify and heighten Carew's memorable enchantment, and the same sheer
singable felicity of phrase. But, unlike Carew, he has no glorious
ungoverned swift-passing raptures; there is in Stanley less fire and
less tenderness. Nor has he anything to repent of. His imagination, as
John Hall discerningly said of it,

'Makes soft Ionic turn grave Lydian.'

Except Habington's, no considerable body of amatory verse in all that
century, certainly not even Cowley's more artificial sequence of 1647,
is, on the whole, so free from stain. Stanley's exemption did not pass
unnoticed; and William Fairfax ('no man fitter!') is careful to instruct
us that Doris, Celinda, and Chariessa were 'various rays' of 'one orient
sun,' and further, that 'no coy ambitious names may here imagine earthly
flames,' because the poet's professional and deliberate homage was
really paid to inward beauty, and never to 'roses of the cheek' alone.
Here we run up against a sweet and famous moral of Carew's, which not
Carew, but Stanley, bears out as the better symbolist of the two. Our
poet does not appear to have contributed towards the religious
literature of a day when the torrent of intense life in human hearts
bred so much heaven-mounting spray, as well as so much necessary scum
and refuse. But his was a temperament so religious that one almost
expects to find somewhere a manuscript volume of 'pious thoughts,' the
shy fruit of Stanley's Christian 'retirements' at home. It will be
noticed that there is one sad devotional poem in this book, 'The lazy
hours move slow'; and as it appears only in John Gamble's book, 1657, it
may fairly be inferred that it was written later than the other lyrics.
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