And here is one more, written after a quarrel, which is the prettiest of all as a song; and interesting for you to compare with the Baron of Bradwardine's song at Lucky M'Leary's:--
"All my sense thy sweetness gained Thy fair hair my heart enchained; My poor reason thy words moved, So that thee, like heav'n, I loved.
Fa, la, la, leridan, dan, dan, dan, deridan; Dan, dan, dan, deridan, dei; While to my mind the outside stood, For messenger of inward good.
Now thy sweetness sour is deemed; Thy hair not worth a hair esteemed, Reason hath thy words removed, Finding that but words they proved.
Fa, la, la, leridan, dan, dan, dan, deridan; Dan, dan, dan, deridan, dei; For no fair sign can credit win, If that the substance fail within.
No more in thy sweetness glory, For thy knitting hair be sorry; Use thy words but to bewail thee, That no more thy beams avail thee; Dan, dan, Dan, dan, Lay not thy colours more to view Without the picture be found true.
Woe to me, alas! she weepeth! Fool! in me what folly creepeth? Was I to blaspheme enraged Where my soul I have engaged? And wretched I must yield to this? The fault I blame, her chasteness is.
Sweetness! sweetly pardon folly; Tie me, hair, your captive wholly; Words! O words of heav'nly knowledge! Know, my words their faults acknowledge; And all my life I will confess, The less I love, I live the less."
Now if you don't like these love-songs, you either have never been in love, or you don't know good writing from bad, (and likely enough both the negatives, I'm sorry to say, in modern England). But perhaps if you are a very severe Evangelical person, you may like them still less, when you know something more about them. Excellent love-songs seem always to be written under strange conditions. The writer of that "Song of Songs" was himself, as you perhaps remember, the child of her for whose sake the Psalmist murdered his Hittite friend; and besides, loved many strange women himself, after that first bride. And these, sixty or more, exquisite love-ditties, from which I choose, almost at random, the above three, are all written by my psalm-singing squire to somebody else's wife, he having besides a very nice wife of his own.
For this squire is the, so called, 'Divine' Astrophel, 'Astrophilos,' or star lover,--the un-to-be-imitated Astrophel, the 'ravishing sweetness of whose poesy,' Sir Piercie Shafton, with his widowed voice,--"widowed in that it is no longer matched by my beloved viol-de-gambo,"--bestows on the unwilling ears of the Maid of Avenel. [97] And the Stella, or star, whom he loved was the Lady Penelope Devereux, who was his first love, and to whom he was betrothed, and remained faithful in heart all his life, though she was married to Robert, Lord Rich, and he to the daughter of his old friend, Sir Francis Walsingham.