possessed of a sufficiently great or pliant genius to achieve any important triumph outside the older and well-worn fashions. Lord Brooke in point of power reigns supreme among these philosophers in verse, but Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum enjoyed a wider contemporary reputation than anything of Lord Brooke's, and has been far more frequently read since. It is a strange performance, and is to be admired rather for the measure of victory it obtains over unfavourable conditions, than for any absolute poetical merits. Some handbook of Christian philosophy seems to have fallen in the author's way during a year of retirement at Oxford,―possibly the De Natura Hominis of Nemesius, of which Wither published an English translation in 1636,-and the text suited a sobered mood, while it offered an opportunity for rehabilitating a reputation shaken by youthful folly and extravagance. Accordingly the Nosce Teipsum was produced, an 'oracle expounded in two Elegies (1) of Human Knowledge; (2) of the Soul of Man and the Immortality thereof.' It is an exposition in the verse of Gondibert and the Annus Mirabilis of what Davies himself calls the 'received opinions,' the orthodox metaphysic of his time, and treats such topics as 'what the soul is;''that the soul is more than the Temperature of the Humors of the Body;' 'that the soul is created immediately by God;' 'the vegetative or Qui kening power;' 'the power of sense, the Relations between wit and will,' &c. &c. All these interminable and tremendous subjects are indeed handled with admirable clearness and brevity. Where Lord Brooke would have wandered on to unmeasured length, thinking his way from cloud to clearness with laborious sincerity, Sir John Davies, a man of far inferior temper and morale, plays the artist with his inartistic material, clearly foresees his end, maps out his arguments and 'acclamations,' and infuses just so much imagination and so much eloquence as will carry the subject to the ears it is intended to reach. Hallam said of Nosce Teipsum that it scarcely contained a languid verse. It may be said of it with equal truth that it scarcely contains a verse of real energy, and that it shows not a spark of that genuine poetic gift which at rare intervals lightens the most heavy and formless of Lord Brooke's Treatises. Nothing in Davies' smoothly turned and occasionally eloquent introduction to his subject proper, 'The Elegy of Human Knowledge,' has the poetic flavour of such lines as these, which break the monotony of Lord Brooke's Treatise on the same subject:

'The chief use then in man of that he knows,
Is his painstaking for the good of all;
Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
Not laughing from a melancholy gall,

Not hating from a soul that overflows

With bitterness, breathed out from inward thrall;
But sweetly rather to ease, to loose or bind,
As need requires, this frail fall'n human kind.'

Expression of this high and tender quality is not to be looked for in Nosce Teipsum. The poem deals with an eternally poetic subject, the longings, griefs, and destiny of the soul, in such a way as to furnish one more illustration of the futility of 'philosophical poetry,' of the manner in which the attempt to combine poetry and science extracts all pathos and all influence from the most pathetic and the most potent of themes. From this judgment we may perhaps exclude the passages, quoted below, which deserve to live when the rest of Nosce Teipsum is forgotten.

Orchestra was a poem of the author's youth, ‘a sudden rash half-capreol of my wit,' as he calls it in the dedication. It is unfinished and immature in style, but there is considerable charm in its wandering fancifulness. The graceful and delicate verse beginning 'For lo, the sea that fleets about the land' (p. 555), will remind a reader of well-known lines in the Ancient Mariner. In one or two other passages Sir John Davies may be suggestively matched with modern poets. The resemblance of his 38th Epigram to Wordsworth's Power of Music has been already pointed out, and a verse of another modern poem,

We see all sights from pole to pole,

And glance and nod and bustle by,
And never once possess our soul
Before we die,'—

recalls a passage in the Elegy 'Of Human Knowledge':—

'We that acquaint ourselves with every Zone,
And pass both Tropics, and behold the Poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own souls.'

MARY A. WARD.

THE SOUL COMPARED TO A RIVER.

[From Nosce Teipsum.]

And as the moisture, which the thirsty earth
Sucks from the sea, to fill her empty veins,
From out her womb at last doth take a birth,
And runs a nymph along the grassy plains:

Long doth she stay, as loth to leave the land,
From whose soft side she first did issue make;
She tastes all places, turns to every hand,
Her flowr'y banks unwilling to forsake :

Yet Nature so her streams doth lead and carry,
As that her course doth make no final stay,
Till she herself unto the ocean marry,
Within whose wat'ry bosom first she lay :

Even so the Soul which in this earthly mould
The Spirit of God doth secretly infuse;
Because at first she doth the earth behold,
And only this material world she views:

At first her mother-earth she holdeth dear,

And doth embrace the world and worldly things:
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings.

Yet under heaven she cannot light on ought
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be:

For who did ever yet, in honour, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceas'd to wish, when he had health?
Or having wisdom was not vext in mind?

Then as a bee which among weeds doth fall,

Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay;
She lights on that, and this, and tasteth all,

But pleas'd with none, doth rise, and soar away;
So, when the Soul finds here no true content,

And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take;
She doth return from whence she first was sent,
And flies to Him that first her wings did make.

THE SOUL COMPARED TO A VIRGIN WOOED IN MARRIAGE. [From the Same.]

As a king's daughter, being in person sought
Of divers princes, who do neighbour near;
On none of them can fix a constant thought,
Though she to all do lend a gentle ear:

Yet she can love a foreign emperor,

Whom of great worth and power she hears to be;
If she be woo'd but by ambassador,

Or but his letters, or his pictures see:

For well she knows, that when she shall be brought
Into the kingdom where her spouse doth reign;
Her eyes shall see what she conceiv'd in thought,
Himself, his state, his glory, and his train.

So while the virgin Soul on earth doth stay,

She woo'd and tempted is ten thousand ways,

By these great powers, which on the earth bear sway;
The wisdom of the world, wealth, pleasure, praise:

With these sometime she doth her time beguile,
These do by fits her fantasy possess ;
But she distastes them all within a while,
And in the sweetest finds a tediousness.

But if upon the world's Almighty King

She once do fix her humble loving thought;
Who by His picture, drawn in every thing,
And sacred messages, her love hath sought;

Of Him she thinks, she cannot think too much;
This honey tasted still, is ever sweet;

The pleasure of her ravished thought is such,
As almost here she with her bliss doth meet:
But when in Heaven she shall His essence see,
This is her sovereign good, and perfect bliss:
Her longings, wishings, hopes all finished be,
Her joys are full, her motions rest in this.
There is she crown'd with garlands of content,
There doth she manna eat, and nectar drink :
That Presence doth such high delights present.
As never tongue could speak, nor heart could think.

ANTINOUS PRAISES DANCING BEFORE QUEEN PENELOPE [From Orchestra, or A Poeme of Dauncing.]

'For that brave Sun the Father of the Day,
Doth love this Earth, the Mother of the Night;
And like a reveller in rich array,

Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight,
Both back, and forth, and sideways, passing light;
His princely grace doth so the gods amaze,
That all stand still and at his beauty gaze.
'But see the Earth, when he approacheth near,
How she for joy doth spring and sweetly smile;
But see again her sad and heavy cheer
When changing places he retires awhile;
But those black clouds he shortly will exile,
And make them all before his presence fly,
As mists consum'd before his cheerful eye.

*

*

*

*

'And now behold your tender nurse the Air
And common neighbour that aye runs around;
How many pictures and impressions fair
Within her empty regions are there found;
Which to your senses Dancing do propound.

For what are Breath, Speech, Echos, Music, Winds,
But Dancings of the Air in sundry kinds?