‘Thou didst appear A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear, As Nature did intend All should confess, but none might comprehend.’
From _Christ’s Victory in Heaven_ of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for its length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage upon ‘Justice,’ who looks ‘as the eagle
that hath so oft compared Her eye with heaven’s’;
from Marlowe’s poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to the priestess
‘And laid his childish head upon her breast’;
‘deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth’;
from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:
‘Cupid abroad was lated in the night, His wings were wet with ranging in the rain’;
from Ben Jonson’s _Hue and Cry_ (not throughout fine) the stanza:
‘Beauties, have ye seen a toy, Called Love, a little boy, Almost naked, wanton, blind; Cruel now, and then as kind? If he be amongst ye, say; He is Venus’ run-away’;
‘I can go rest On her sweet breast That is the pride of Cynthia’s train’;
‘Return, return, gay planet of mine east’!
The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, but the citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love.
At the very beginning, Skelton’s song to ‘Mistress Margery Wentworth’ had almost taken a place; but its charm is hardly fine enough. If it is necessary to answer the inevitable question in regard to Byron, let me say that in another Anthology, a secondary Anthology, the one in which Gray’s _Elegy_ would have an honourable place, some more of Byron’s lyrics would certainly be found; and except this there is no apology. If the last stanza of the ‘Dying Gladiator’ passage, or the last stanza on the cascade rainbow at Terni,
‘Love watching madness with unalterable mien,’
had been separate poems instead of parts of _Childe Harold_, they would have been amongst the poems that are here collected in no spirit of arrogance, or of caprice, of diffidence or doubt.
The volume closes some time before the middle of the century and the death of Wordsworth.