A Salutation
High-hearted Surrey! I do love your ways,
Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honor sealed and blent,
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays:
I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays;
Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent,
Heard as in dreams from some old harper's tent,
And stirring in the listener's brain for days.
Good father-poet! if to-night there be
At Framlingham none save the north-wind's sighs,
No guard but moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,
Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me,
Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes
Sought not one other down three hundred years!
A Footnote To A Famous Lyric
TRUE love’s own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
Gave to our Saxon speech:
Chief miracle of theme and touch
That upstart enviers adore:
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
No critic born since Charles was king
But sighed in smiling, as he read:
“Here ’s theft of the supremest thing
A poet might have said!”
Young knight and wit and beau, who won,
Mid war’s adventure, ladies’ praise,
Was ’t well of you, ere you had done,
To blight our modern bays?
O yet to you, whose random hand
Struck from the dark whole gems like these,
Archaic beauty, never planned
Nor reared by wan degrees,
Which leaves an artist poor, and art
An earldom richer all her years;
To you, dead on your shield apart,
Be “Ave!” passed in tears.
How shall this singing era spurn
Her master, and in lauds be loath?
Your worth, your work, bid us discern
Light exquisite in both.
’T was virtue’s breath inflamed your lyre,
Heroic from the heart it ran;
Nor for the shedding of such fire
Lives since a manlier man.
And till your strophe sweet and bold
So lovely aye, so lonely long,
Love’s self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold
The pinnacles of song.
