" This delicate epicede would
have fitted Imogen:
Here a solemne fast we keepe
While all beauty lyes asleepe;
Husht be all things; no noyse here
But the toning of a teare,
Or a sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering.
Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in essence; the Mad Maid's Song,
for example. The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist. A
poet's lyrics may be, as most of Browning's are, just so many
_dramatis personae_. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in a
seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized
in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his
couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances are
intended presentations of himself:
To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
In point of fact he was a whole group of imaginary lovers in one.
Silvia, Anthea, Electra, Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively
ladies ending in _a_, were doubtless, for the most part, but airy
phantoms dancing--as they should not have danced--through the brain of
a sentimental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar of the Church
of England.
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