218

CHAPTER XIII.

POETS AND BEAUTIES,

FROM CHARLES II. TO QUEEN ANNE.

THUS, then, it appears, that love, even the most ethereal and poetical, does not always take flight "at sight of human ties ;" and Pope wronged the real delicacy of Heloïse when he put this borrowed sentiment into her epistle, making that conduct the result of perverted principle, which, in her, was a sacrifice to extreme love and pride in its object. It is not the mere idea of bondage which frightens away the light-winged god ;

The gentle bird feels no captivity

Within his cage, but sings and feeds his fill.*

It is when those bonds, which were first decreed

in heaven

To keep two hearts together, which began

Their spring-time with one love,

are abused to vilest purposes :-to link together indissolubly, unworthiness with desert, truth with falsehood, brutality with gentleness; then indeed love is scared; his cage becomes a dungeon ;-and either he breaks away, with plumage all impaired, or folds up his many-coloured wings, and droops and dies.

But then it will be said, perhaps, that the splendour and the charm which poetry has thrown over some of these pictures of conjugal affection and wedded truth, are exterior and adventitious, or, at best, short-lived :—the bands were at first graceful and flowery;-but sorrow dewed them with tears, or selfish passions sullied them, or death tore them asunder, or trampled them down. It may be so; but still I will aver that what has been, is that there is a power in the human heart which survives sorrow, passion, age, death itself.

Love I esteem more strong than age,

And truth more permanent than time.

For happiness, c'est different! and for that bright and pure and intoxicating happiness which we weave into our youthful visions, which is of such stuff as dreams are made of,-to complain that this does not last and wait upon us through life, is to complain that earth is earth, not heaven. It is to repine that the violet does not outlive the spring; that the rose dies upon the breast of June; that the grey evening shuts up the eye of day, and that old age quenches the glow of youth for is not such the condition under which we exist? All I wished to prove was, that the sacred tie which binds the sexes together, which gives to man his natural refuge in the tenderness of woman, and to woman her natural protecting stay in the right reason and stronger powers of man, so far from being a chill to the imagination, as wicked wits would tell us, has its poetical side. Let us look back for a moment on the array of bright names and beautiful verse, quoted or alluded to in the

preceding chapters: what is there among the mercurial poets of Charles's days, those notorious scoffers at decency and constancy, to compare with them?-Dorset and Denham, and Sedley and Suckling, and Rochester," the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," with their smooth emptiness, and sparkling common-places of artificial courtship, and total want of moral sentiment, have degraded, not elevated the loves they sang. Could these gallant fops rise up from their graves, and see themselves exiled with contempt from every woman's toilet, every woman's library, every woman's memory, they would choak themselves with their own periwigs, eat their laced cravats, hang themselves in their own sword-knots!

"to be discarded thence!"

Turn thy complexion there,

Thou simpering, smooth-lipp'd cherub, Coxcombry,

Ay, there, look grim as hell!

And such be the fate of all who dare profane the altar of beauty with adulterate incense!

For wit is like the frail luxuriant vine,

Unless to virtue's prop it join ;

Though it with beauteous leaves and pleasant fruit

be crown'd,

It lies deform'd and rotting on the ground!

These lines are from Cowley,—a great name among the poets of those days; but he has sunk into a name. We may repeat with Pope, "Who now reads Cowley?" and this, not because he was licentious, but because, with all his elaborate wit, and brilliant and uncommon thoughts, he is as frigid as ice itself. "A little ingenuity and artifice," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, is well enough; but Cowley, in his amatory poetry, is all artifice. He coolly sat down to write a volume of love verses, that he might, to use his own expression, "be free of his craft, as a poet ;" and in his preface, he protests "that his testimony should not be taken against himself." Here was a poet, and a lover! who sets out by begging his readers, in the first place, not to believe him. This was like the weaver, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, who was so anxious to assure his