To be vexed at a trifle or two that I writ,

Your judgment at once, and my passion you wrong: You take that for fact, which will scarce be found wit: Od's life! must one swear to the truth of a song? What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shews The difference there is betwixt nature and art:

I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:

And they have my whimsies; but thou hast my heart.
The god of us verse-men (you know Child) the sun,
How after his journeys he sets up his rest:
If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run;
At night he reclines on his Thetis's breast.

So when I am wearied with wandering all day;
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come :
No matter what beauties I saw in my way:
They were but my visits, but thou art my home.
Then finish, dear Chloe, this pastoral war;
And let us like Horace and Lydia agree:

For thou art a girl as much brighter than her,
As he was a poet sublimer than me.

A SIMILE.

Dear Thomas, did'st thou never pop
Thy head into a tin-man's shop?
There, Thomas, did'st thou never see
('Tis but by way of Simile!)

A squirrel spend his little rage,
In jumping round a rolling cage?
The cage, as either side turned up,
Striking a ring of bells a-top ?—

Moved in the orb, pleased with the chimes,

The foolish creature thinks he climbs :

But here or there, turn wood or wire,

He never gets two inches higher.

So fares it with those merry blades,
That frisk it under Pindus' shades.
In noble songs, and lofty odes,

They tread on stars, and talk with Gods;
Still dancing in an airy round,

Still pleased with their own verses' sound; Brought back, how fast soe'er they go, Always aspiring, always low.

EPIGRAM.

To John I owed great obligation;
But John, unhappily, thought fit
To publish it to all the nation :

Sure John and I are more than quit.

ANOTHER.

Yes, every poet is a fool:

By demonstration Ned can show it: Happy, could Ned's inverted rule

Prove every fool to be a poet.

FOR MY OWN TOMB-STONE.

To me 'twas given to die: to thee 'tis given To live alas! one moment sets us even. Mark! how impartial is the will of Heaven !

LADY WINCHILSEA.

[ANNE FINCH, Countess of Winchilsea, was born about 1660, at Sidmonton, Hants, the residence of her father, Sir William Kingsmill. She married Heneage Finch, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, who survived her six years. She died on the 5th of August, 1720, leaving no issue. Her works consist of The Spleen, a pindaric ode, 1701; The Prodigy, 1706; Miscellany Poems, 1713; and Aristomenes, a tragedy.]

In that invaluable Essay which Wordsworth appended to his Lyrical Ballads in 1815, he says that 'excepting the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost and the Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature.' This remark, although rather acute than exact, since the poet forgets both Gay and Parnell, did eminent service in restoring to the list of English poets a name entirely and unworthily forgotten. Since Wordsworth's mention of Lady Winchilsea, the one piece that he cites has been often reprinted in collections of verse, but it cannot be said that any further effort has been made to investigate the claims of the neglected authoress. Her poems have never been edited or described, and we believe that our present selection will reveal to almost all our readers a writer positively unknown to them. Yet she was a poetess of singular originality and excellence; her lines To the Nightingale have lyrical qualities which were scarcely approached in her own age, and would do credit to the best, while her odes and more weighty pieces have a strength and accomplishment of style which make the least interesting of them worth reading.

Lady Winchilsea was one of the last pindaric writers of the school of Cowley. Her odes display that species of writing in the

final dissolution out of which it was redeemed by Gray and Collins. Such a poem as her All is Vanity, full as it is of ingenious thought, and studded with noble and harmonious lines, fails to impress the attention as a vertebrate composition. Her Ode to the Spleen, from which Pope borrowed his famous 'aromatic pain,' is still more loose and fragmentary in structure. On the other hand, her less ambitious studies have a singular perfection of form and picturesqueness of manner. She lights upon the right epithet and employs it with precision, and gives a brilliant turn, even to a triviality, by some bright and natural touch. Her Nocturnal Reverie is worthy of Wordsworth's commendation; it is simply phenomenal as the creation of a friend of Prior and of Pope, and some of the couplets, especially those which describe the straying horse, and the cries of the birds, are worthy of the closest observers of nature in a naturalistic age. In light verse Lady Winchilsea took Prior as a model, and succeeded respectably; her reply to Pope's complimentary verses to her under the name of Ardelia deserves higher praise.

From her age to this Lady Winchilsea has received nothing but neglect from the English public. Her contemporaries disregarded her writings, as she herself complains, and in 1753 there were still existing two collections of her poems in MS., which no one had taken the trouble to print. To the public of the eighteenth century her delicate observation of nature seemed less important than the didactic lyricism of Mrs. Barber or the frivolity of Lætitia Pilkington. If those unpublished poems, to which reference has been made, are still in the possession of her family, it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world.

EDMUND W. GOSSE

TO THE NIGHTINGALE.

Exert thy voice, sweet harbinger of Spring!
This moment is thy time to sing,
This moment I attend to praise,
And set my numbers to thy lays;
Free as thine shall be my song,
As thy music, short or long ;
Poets, wild as thou, were born,
Pleasing best when unconfined,
When to please is least designed,
Soothing but their cares to rest;
Cares do still their thoughts molest,
And still the unhappy poet's breast

Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn.

She begins! Let all be still!

Muse, thy promise now fulfil!

Sweet! oh sweet! still sweeter yet!

Can thy words such accents fit?

Canst thou syllables refine,

Melt a sense that shall retain

Still some spirit of the brain,

Till with sounds like those it join?
'Twill not be! then change thy note,
Let division shake thy throat!
Hark! division now she tries,
Yet as far the Muse outflies!
Cease then, prithee, cease thy tune,
Trifler, wilt thou sing till June?
Till thy business all lies waste
And the time of building's past?
Thus we poets that have speech,-
Unlike what thy forests teach,—
If a fluent vein be shown

That's transcendent to our own,
Criticise, reform or preach,
Censuring what we cannot reach.