EDMUND WALLER.*

SACILARISSA, and the poetic passion she inspired in Edmund Waller, have been lately rescued from a partial oblivion, and

a careful reprint of Waller's poems, edited, with many in- teresting notes, by Mr. G. Thorn Drury, cannot fail to be acceptable to all lovers of English poetry. " Waller was smooth," said Pope; but mere smoothness would not account for the extraordinary popularity accorded to the poet in his own time, in spite of the contemptible part he played after the discovery of the plot that bears his name. On his return from exile, Waller became once more the favourite poet, wit, and orator of his day, and on his tomb in Beaconsfield churchyard was inscribed, " Inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps." Most of Waller's poems are what we call occasional verses, and he piped to such trivial themes as " On a tree cut in paper," or " A. card that her Majesty tore at Ombre." But beside these trifles are to be found many exquisite lyrics; as, for instance, the verses " To Amoret" and " To Phyllis," not to speak of the famous " Go, Lovely Rose," and lines " On a Girdle." Dr. Johnson says of the " Panegyric to My Lord Protector " that " such a series of verses had rarely appeared before in the English language. Of the lines, some are grand, some are graceful, and all are musical;" though he goes on to observe characteristically, " its great fault is the choice of its hero." Waller's sympathies were generally with the winning side, and he was as ready to indite verses to " Hie Majesty on his Happy Return," as he was to eulogise " His Highness the Lord Protector," living or dead. Though the poet joined in an unsuccessful plot against the Parliament, he was a true lover of his country ; and some of the best lines in the poem entitled " On a War with Spain," were inspired by pride in the British Navy :—

" Others may use the ocean as their road, Only the English make it their abode, Whose ready sails with every wind can fly And make a covenant with th' inconstant sky ; Our oaks secure, as if they there took root, We tread on billows with a steady foot."

We can but admire the dexterity with which be praises alike rebellious subjects and restored Sovereign. Mr. Drury says, "It is difficult, indeed, to suppose that Waller's two poems on Cromwell were not inspired by genuine admiration

and regret." Yet he uses the same epithets for Claarls when his turn came.

He compares Cromwell to the most warlike of English princes,—an adroit piece of flattery, and one likely to tickle the ear of his Highness, as would also the concluding lines of the poem, " On a War with Spain," which suggest the prospect of

a kingly crown, the carefully repressed climax of Cromwell's ambition. Waller's praise was equally, and probably with greater sincerity, at the service of Charles, though there was less to say, for as yet the King had only suffered the " sweet uses of adversity," and the poet could only prophesy smooth

things to come. Forgetting that he had recently sung of Crom- well,- " While all your neighbour princes unto you

Like Joseph's sheaves, pay reverence and bow,"

he wonders that England, "become the scorn and hate of her proud neighbours," could have lived without Charles. Even " The revolted sea

Trembles to think she did your foes obey," —a rhyme, by the way, that shows a change in our pronuncia- tion as clearly as Pope's couplet :—

" Here thou, great Anna ! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea."

The glow of the famous Panegyric somewhat outshone the paler lustre of the " Happy Return," and we are told that,

when the King commented on the inferiority of the latter poem, Waller, with great readiness answered, " Sir, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth."

The poems on Sacharissa, "a maid high-born, and lovely as the blushing morn, of noble Sidney's race," and her beautiful home at Penshurat, where the poet sang his passion to the deer among the beeches, or watched Vandyck painting her in

the "Shop of Beauty," have immortalised the lady, and added unfading laurels to the poet's crown :—

" What's she, so late from Penshurst come, More gorgeous than the mid-day sun, • The Poona of Edmund Waller. Edited by G. Thorn Drury. London : Lal roma and /Innen. That all the world amazes P Sure 'tis some angel from above, Or 'tis the Cyprian Queen of Love

Attended by the Graces.

........ .

To welcome her the Spring breathes forth Tho sun renews his darting fires, Elysian sweets, March strews the earth With violets and posies, April puts on her best attires, And May her crown of roses."

He sings to Sacharissa's picture, to her painter, her friends, her servant, her coming and going, her sleeping or not sleep- ing, but in vain. The Lady Dorothy chose a wooer of higher degree, Lord Spencer, afterwards created Earl of Sunder- land, who was killed at the battle of Newbury. In later days we hear of another meeting between Mr. Waller and Sacharissa. " When, Mr. Waller," said the Dowager Countess of Sunderland, "will you write such beautiful verses to me again?" "When, Madam," replied the poet, "your Ladyship is as handsome and young again." This must surely be calumny,—so accomplished a courtier would have turned his answer more skilfully. His " Love's Farewell " is a more fitting close to the romance.

There is a robustness in some of Waller's verses, in spite of

the classical allusions with which they abound, and which were but a reflex of the age when every woman was a nymph or a goddess, and the Muses were still invoked, that is a welcome relief from the flood of prettinesses, the songs of clouds, trees, birds, and flowers, poured out by our modern " field poets." Though he began both his Parliamentary and poetical career at an age when the present generation has hardly left school, he attained at once, and instinctively, a clear, harmoniously flowing style of his own. He had studied Fairfax's translation of Tasso, and taking that poet as his model, revolted against the extravagant hyperboles and rugged conceits of Donne and the earlier poets of the metaphysical school. He was among the first to bring into free use the "heroic couplet," and, as he wrote in a book of his own poems :- " Lines not composed as heretofore in baste,

Polished like marble, shall like marble last,"

This harmonious metre was the spring from whence flowed in later days Dryden's " full-resounding line " and Pope's epi- grammatic couplets, compressing, as it did, the sense into neatly-finished double verses, with distinct pause and correct emphasis, though occasionally halting and deficient in rhyme. The reign of rugged, involved images, and far-stretched similes was almost over, and Waller's departure into newer and simpler ways was joyfully welcomed by his contemporaries, as we find in the preface to the second part of his Poems, printed in 1690 The reader needs be told no more in com- mendation of these Poems, than that they are Mr. Waller's, a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful in poetry. He was, indeed, the parent of English verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it." At the same time, as Mr. Drury remarks, " Waller was sadly deficient in critical instinct as applied to the writings of others ; " and we note a curious confirmation of that criticism in the poem " Of English Verse," where he says :— "Poets that lasting marble seek

Must carve in Latin or in Greek; We write in sand, our language grows, And, like the tide, our work o'erflows. Chaucer his sense can only boast, The glory of his numbers lost ! Years have defaced his matchless strain ; And yet he did not sing in vain."

The verdict of succeeding years has pronounced differently. Chaucer is studied and lectured on, while Waller had ceased to be accessible except in second-hand bookshops. As one of the makers of English verse, Waller has a claim on our respect and admiration, and the lines he wrote at the ripe age of eighty-three, " Of the last verses in the book," have no small share in that respect ; but he has no claim to be a teacher. He is free from the grossness that disfigures the writings of many authors of his clay, and pleases chiefly by his method of con- struction and the choice of incidents that he illuminates in graceful and appropriate verses, as well as by the few more ambitious poems to which reference has already been made. Though only removed by two decades from Spenser, we can see a great stride forward in the language which, when the spelling is modernised, is free from all archaic and obsolete

words. Mr. Drury has omitted one poem hitherto ascribed to Waller, and included some verses for the first time, the whole text being revised and edited with minute care.