THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 15

blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused
her, one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool as
the very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden
increase of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: "For
naught thy cheeks that morn do raise." What sweet, nay, what
solemn roses!

Again:

"Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations overspread her face."

The seventeenth century has possession of that "morn" caught once
upon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its
freshness to wither it.


TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS


The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone--not unique,
for it had sounded somewhere in mediaeval poetry in Italy--but in a
dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against
inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something
like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely
justified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region of
tolerance and pardon.


THE PULLEY


An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite
verses. George Herbert was maladroit in using the word "rest" in
two senses. "Peace" is not quite so characteristic a word, but it
ought to take the place of "rest" in the last line of the second
stanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not have
this rather distressing ambiguity. The poem is otherwise perfect
beyond description.


MISERY


George Herbert's work is so perfectly a box where thoughts
"compacted lie," that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry,
to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours;
nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely
passage as this -

"He was a garden in a Paradise."


THE ROSE


There is nothing else of Waller's fine enough to be admitted here;
and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in
words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the
third-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two
kinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argument