consists in its domestic tenderness, and in the natural air of melancholy fondness breathing through every line. The influence of the absence of a beloved object upon the fairest scenes of nature has rarely been portrayed with more truth or pathos. The hawthorn her friend had trimmed, the bank on which he lay near a shady mulberry, and the twilight harbours where the shadows seemed to woo

The weary lovesick passenger

are all affectionately remembered *.

to sit,

In the same year appeared the. Preparation for the Psalter, a specimen of a voluminous commentary upon the Psalms, which the author never completed. Yet even here the polemical spirit of the Satirist occasionally manifests itself. Wither, unfortunately, did not sufficiently remember that he stood upon Holy Ground. To the Preparation he prefixed what he calls a Sonnet, forming a very spirited paraphrase upon the 148th Psalm; Merrick's version will read coldly after it;

Come, O come, with sacred lays,
Let us sound th' Almighty's praise.
Hither bring in true concent,
Heart, and voice, and instrument.
Let the orpharion sweet

With the harp and viol meet:

To your voices tune the lute;

Let not tongue, nor string be mute;
Nor a creature dumb be found,

That hath either voice or sound.

* Annexed to Fidelia are two sonnets, Hence away, thou Siren, leave me, and Shall I wasting in Despair, both of which have been reprinted in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The second song Park thinks had its prototype in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, but he assigns no reason for giving the priority of invention to Browne. The beauty of these sonnets has been universally acknowledged. Shall I wasting in Despair, which Ben Johnson parodied, was a general favourite during the Author's life-time. Numerous imitations of it have been pointed out. These poems were subsequently incorporated into Fair Virtue, with some alterations, as Park has observed, not always for the better.

Let such things as do not live,
In still music praises give:
Lowly pipe, ye worms that creep,
On the earth, or in the deep,
Loud aloft your voices strain,
Beasts and monsters of the main.
Birds, your warbling treble sing;
Clouds, your peals of thunder ring;
Sun and moon, exalted higher,
And you, stars, augment the quire.
Come, ye sons of human race,
In this chorus take your place,
And amid this mortal throng,
Be you masters of the song.
Angels and celestial powers,
Be the noblest tenor yours.
Let, in praise of God, the sound
Run a never-ending round;
That our holy hymn may be
Everlasting, as is HE.

From the earth's vast hollow womb,
Music's deepest base shall come.
Sea and floods, from shore to shore,
Shall the counter-tenor roar.
To this concert, when we sing,
Whistling winds, your descant bring
Which may bear the sound above,
Where the orb of fire doth move;
And so climb from sphere to sphere,
Till our song th' Almighty hear.

So shall HE from Heaven's high tower
On the earth his blessings shower;
All this huge wide orb we see,

Shall one quire, one temple be.
There our voices we will rear,
Till we fill it everywhere:
And enforce the fiends that dwell
In the air, to sink to hell.

Then, O come, with sacred lays,

Let us sound th' Almighty's praise.

In the Preparation to the Psalter, Wither announced his intention of dividing the Treatise upon the Psalms

into fifteen Decades. The Exercises upon the First Psalm were published in 1620, and inscribed to Sir John Smith, Knt., only son of Sir Thomas Smith, Governor of the East India Company, from whom the poet had received many tokens of regard. The Exercises upon the nine following Psalms, we are told in the Fides Anglicana, were lost. In 1621 he published the Songs of the Old Testament, translated into English measures, afterwards reprinted in the Hymns and Songs of the Church.

One of the most beautiful and least known of his early productions, is Fair Virtue, the mistress of Philarete, which, although not circulated until 1622, is described as one of his "first poems, and composed many years agone." The MS. having been secretly "gotten out of the author's custody by a friend of his," came into the hands of Marriot, the bookseller, who having obtained a license for it, intended to print it without any further inquiry: but hearing the name of Wither mentioned as the real author, he applied to him for permission to affix his name to the titlepage, a request he found the poet unwilling to comply with, "fearing that the seeming lightness of such a subject might somewhat disparage the more serious studies" he had since undertaken. These particulars are gathered from the address to the reader, professedly written by Marriot, but in reality furnished to him, at his own desire, by the poet himself. Wither at length consented to the anonymous publication of the poem, and introduced it with these singular and characteristic remarks:-" When I first composed it I well liked thereof, and it well enough became my years; but now I neither like nor dislike it. That, therefore, it should be divulged, I desire not; and whether it be, or whether (if it happen so) it be approved or no, I care not. For this I am sure of, that however it be valued, it is worth as much as I prize it at; likely it is, also, to be as beneficial to the world, as the world

hath been to me, and will be more than those, who like it not, ever deserved at my hands."

66

The mystery hanging over certain parts of the poem, he refused to clear up, desiring, he said, to see what Sir Politick Would-be and his companions could pick out of it." The opinion, that he intended to portray the charms and piety of some lady in the neighbourhood of Bentworth, seems to be corroborated by certain verses written to his loving friend upon his departure," inserted at the end of Fair Virtue, and signed "Phil'arete."

The poem was evidently the production of his youthful Muse, and bears internal evidence of having been composed in the sequestered retirements of Bentworth. It opens with an introduction in heroic metre, unlike his later style, and resembling rather the soft and limpid versification of Browne:

Two pretty rills do meet, and, meeting, make
Within one valley a large silver lake,

About whose banks the fertile mountains stood,
In ages passed bravely crowned with wood;
Which lending cold sweet shadows gave it grace
To be accounted Cynthia's bathing-place.
And from her father Neptune's brackish court,
Fair Thetis hither often would resort,
Attended by the fishes of the sea,

Which in those sweeter waters came to play.
There would the daughter of the sea-god dive;
And thither came the land-nymphs every eve,
To wait upon her; bringing for her brows
Rich garlands of sweet flowers, and beechy boughs;

For pleasant was that pool; and near it then
Was neither rotten marsh, nor boggy fen.
It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge,
Nor grew there rudely then along the edge
A bending willow, nor a prickly bush,
Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush.
But here, well ordered was a grove with bowers,
There grassy plots set round about with flowers.

Here, you might thro' the waters see the land
Appear, strewed o'er with white, or yellow sand.
Yea, deeper was it: and the wind by whiffs
Would make it rise, and wash the little cliffs
On which oft pluming sat unfrighted then,
The gaggling wild-goose, and the snow-white swan;
With all the flocks of fowls, which to this day,
Upon those quiet waters breed and play.

All the features of this animated landscape are not yet obliterated. The Ford of Arle, or Arlesford Pond, lying S.W. of the town of that name, is a fine piece of water, covering nearly two hundred acres, and forming a head to the river Itchin. A few years ago boats were kept upon this lake by the proprietors of the neighbouring estates, and "the gaggling wild-goose" might be seen "oft pluming," without any fear, upon the quiet waters:

North-east, not far from this great pool, there lies
A tract of beechy mountains that arise,
With leisurely ascending, to such height,
As from their tops the warlike Isle of Wight
You in the ocean's bosom may espie,

Tho' near two hundred furlongs hence it lie.
The pleasant way, as up those hills you climb,
Is strewed o'er with marjoram and thyme
Which grows unset. The hedge-rows do not want
The cowslip, violet, primrose, nor a plant
That freshly scents: as birch, both green and tall,
Low swallows on whose bloomings bees do fall,
Fair woodbines, which about the hedges twine,
Smooth privet, and the sharp sweet eglantine,
With many more, whose leaves and blossoms fair,
The earth adorn, and oft perfume the air.

E'en there, and in the least frequented place
Of all these mountains, is a little space

Of pleasant ground, hemmed in with dropping trees,
And those so thick, that Phoebus scarcely sees

The earth they grow on once in all the year,

Nor what is done among the shadows there.

Along these sequestered paths the poet represents "a troop of beauties,"