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As when wild Pentheus, grown mad with fear,
Whole troops of hellish hags about him spies;
Two bloody suns stalking the dusky sphere,
And two-fold Thebes runs rolling in his eyes;
Or through the scene staring Orestes flies,

With eyes flung back upon his mother's ghost,
That with infernal serpents all embost,

And torches quencht in blood, doth her stern son accost.

Such horrid gorgons, and misformed forms
Of damned fiends, flew dancing in his heart,
That, now, unable to endure their storms,

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Fly, fly, (he cries) thyself, whate'er thou art,
Hell, hell, already burns in ev'ry part."

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So down into his Torturer's arms he fell
Yet oft he snatcht, and started as he hung
So when the senses half enslumbered lie,
The headlong body, ready to be flung
By the deluding fancy from some high
And craggy rock, recovers greedily,

And clasps the yielding pillow, half asleep,
And, as from heaven it tumbled to the deep,
Feels a cold sweat through every member creep.

Euripides might have written these stanzas in the season of his solemn inspiration. In the "staring Orestes," we seem to behold the wretched mourner bursting from the enfolding arms of the weeping Electra, and fleeing in horror from the Furies surrounding his couch*.

The poet describes Joseph of Arimathea at the cross. The still grief of the humble and affectionate mourner is described with some quaintness:—

But long he stood in his faint arms upholding
The fairest spoil heaven ever forfeited,
With such a silent passion grief unfolding,
That had the sheet but on himself been spread,
He for the corse might have been buried.

The departure of Joseph and his companions from the sepulchre is in a purer vein:—

* Τας αἱματωπους καὶ δρακοντώδεις κορας.—Euripid. Orest. 1. 250.

Thus spend we tears, that never can be spent
On him that sorrow now no more shall see.

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Here bury we

This heavenly earth; here let it softly sleep,
The fairest Shepherd of the fairest sheep.

So all the body kist, and homeward went to weep.

The fourth canto, Christ's Triumph after Death, commences with a morning-landscape, not free from affectation, but displaying a poetical selection of circumstances, and in one or two passages recalling Milton.

But now the second morning from her bower,
Began to glister in her beams; and now
The roses of the day began to flower

In the eastern garden; for heaven's silent brow
Half insolent for joy began to show:

The early sun came lively dancing out

And the brag lambs ran wantoning about,

That heaven and earth might seem in triumph both to
shout.

The engladdened Spring, forgetful now to weep,
Began t' eblazon from her leavie bed;

The waking swallow broke her half-year's sleep,
And every bush lay deeply perfumed

With violets

He illustrates the glorious unclouding of the Godhead, when it had put off the tabernacle of flesh, by an exquisite image:

So fairest Phosphor, the bright morning star,
But newly washed in the green element,
Before the drowsy night is half aware,

Shooting his flaming locks with dew besprent,
Springs lively up into the orient,

And the bright drove, fleeced in gold, he chases

The entrance into heaven, the triumph of the angelic host, the everlasting happiness of the saints of God, these form the sacred subjects of the poet's pen in the concluding book of his poem: Christ will be the light of the Christian Paradise

And if a sullen cloud, as sad as night,
In which the sun may seem embodied,
Depriv'd of all his dross, we see so white,
Burning in melted gold his wat'ry head,
Or round with ivory edges silvered,

What lustre super-excellent will He

Lighten on those that shall his sunshine see,

In that all-glorious court, in which all glories be?

There every tear is wiped away from the eyes of those who, having fought a good fight, have entered into the joy of their Lord :

No sorrow now hangs clouding on their brow,
No bloodless malady empales their face,
No age drops on their hairs his silver snow,
No nakedness their bodies doth embase,
No poverty themselves and theirs disgrace;
No fear of death the joy of life devours,

No loss, no grief, no change, wait on their winged hours.

The impersonation of the Deity is in the loftiest spirit of Hebrew poetry, although, towards the conclusion, it partakes of that beautiful mysticism of which Bishop Taylor, in his majestic prose, has furnished so many splendid examples :

In midst of this city celestial,

Where the eternal Temple should have rose,
Lightened the Idea Beatifical:

End and Beginning of each thing that grows,
Whose self, no end nor yet beginning knows;

That hath no eyes to see, nor ears to hear,
Yet sees and hears, and is all eye, all ear,
That nowhere is contained, and yet is every where.
Changer of all things, yet immutable,
Before and after all, the first, and last,

That moving all, is yet immoveable,
Great without quantity, in whose forecast

Things past are present, things to come are past;
Swift without motion, to whose open eye
The hearts of wicked men unbreasted lie,
At once absent and present to them, far and nigh.

It is no flaming lustre made of light,
No sweet concent, or well-timed harmony,
Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,
Or flowery odour mixt with spicery,
No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily;

And yet it is a kind of inward feast,

A harmony that sounds within the breast,

An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest. Although several poems had appeared in Italy, founded upon the life and resurrection of our Saviour, Fletcher claims the merit of having been the earliest of our own poets who strung his lyre to this noble theme. In the management of the subject he was naturally influenced by the character of the Fairy Queen. Spenser died in 1598-9. At this time Fletcher could scarcely have been more than twelve or thirteen years old; but it is evident that his study of that charming poem commenced in childhood. In the preceding remarks it has been sometimes necessary to bring Fletcher into direct comparison with Milton. The peculiar excellencies of the Paradise Regained and Christ's Victory, are not difficult to define. In Scriptural simplicity of conception, and in calm and sustained dignity of tone, the palm of superiority must be awarded to Milton; while in fertility of fancy, earnestness of devotion, and melody of expression, Fletcher may be said to rival his sublime successor. Christ's Victory consists of a series of pictures; it is deficient in unity, and in the concentration of interest demanded by an epic poem. The power of the writer comes out in occasional touches of great vigour and beauty, indeed, but rendered comparatively ineffective by their uncertainty. His poem, to employ his own magnificent image, does not blaze like a rock of diamond. It has not the lustre of one great luminous whole, unbroken in the purity of its splendour; its brilliancy is dazzling, but fragmentary. Fletcher drew his sacred imagery from Spenser; Milton from the Bible. The first flashes; the second shines.

88

PHINEAS FLETCHER.

THE life of Phineas Fletcher, though equally studious and retired, seems to have been more happy and tranquil than that of his brother. He was admitted from Eton, a scholar of King's College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow. In 1621, Sir Henry Willoughby presented him to the living of Hilgay, in Norfolk, which he probably retained until his death, about 1650. In that year he was succeeded by Arthur Tower, who was appointed by the Committee of plundered ministers *.

The poems of Fletcher, although not published until he was 66 entering upon his winter," we learn from the dedication to Mr. Edward Benlowes, were the “ raw essays" of his "very unripe years." Of his principal

composition, The Purple Island, it does not come within my plan to give an elaborate account. It was praised by Cowley, and Quarles addressed the author as the Spenser of the age. Much of the picturesque fancy of the Fairy Queen certainly plays over the ingenious eccentricities of The Purple Island. Fletcher possessed, in no small degree, the same rich imagination, the same love of allegorical extravagances, and the same sweetness and occasional majesty of numbers. But of all the qualities required to form a poet, he was especially deficient in taste, in that sense of the soul, which, by a kind of Ithuriel instinct, examines every image and epithet, and rejects them when not accordant with the dignity of the art. No man of genius, with the exception of Fletcher, and Quarles, who meditated a poem on a similar subject, would have thought

* Blomefield's Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 11 vols. 8vo. London, 1805-10, v. 7, p. 373. Mr. Chalmers, who refers to this History, takes no notice of its author's error in calling P. Fletcher the brother of the Bishop of London, who, we have seen, was his uncle.

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