The honey-bee, that wanders all day long,
The field, the woodland, and the garden o’er,
To gather in his fragrant winter store,
Humming in calm content his quiet song,
Seeks not alone the rose’s glowing breast,
The lily’s dainty cup, the violet’s lips—
But from all rank and noxious weeds he sips
The single drop of sweetness closely press’d
Within the poison chalice. Thus, if we
Seek only to draw forth the hidden sweet,
In all the varied human flowers we meet,
In the wide garden of humanity;
And like the bee, if home the spoil we bear,
Hived in our hearts, it turns to nectar there.
ANNE C. LYNCH.
[Illustration: [Pastoral Scene]]
III.
=Spring.=
Giles Fletcher is one of the old English poets but little known to the
general reader in America. And yet he was the author of a poem of high
merit. He was born about twenty years after Shakspeare, or in 1588, and
came of a family marked by great poetical talent. John Fletcher, the
celebrated dramatist and fellow-laborer of Beaumont, was a cousin, and
it was his elder brother, Phineas Fletcher, who wrote “The Purple
Island,” that singular and elaborate poetical allegory, carried out
through twelve cantos, and relieved by much occasional beauty of thought
and style. The father also, Dr. Giles Fletcher, has been ranked among
the good poets of his day. The only work of Giles Fletcher, the son,
which has been published, is of a religious character, “Christ’s Victory
and Triumph,” a poem in four parts. It has never been reprinted entire
in America, though full of fine passages, and marked throughout with
originality and beauty. The
subjects are of course very much of the same nature as those of
“Paradise Regained;” a comparison of the two poems, however, by no means
diminishes our admiration for the work of Fletcher, especially when we
bear in mind that he wrote half a century before Milton. In fact,
“Christ’s Victory and Triumph” was, at the time it appeared, the finest
sacred poem of any length in our language; it is full of a jubilant
poetical eloquence and the earnest expression of strong religious
feeling connected with the subject. Giles Fetcher, like his brother
Phineas, was a clergyman of the Church of England, and led an uneventful
life in his country parish of Alderton, Suffolk, where he died in 1623.
A description of Spring at Easter will, it is hoped, give the reader
pleasure.