The only undramatic pastorals in the language worth mention are those of Browne, a young poet, who wrote in the beginning of the reign of James the First. He won the praises of Drayton and Ben Jonson, and may remind the reader of some of the earlier poems of Keats. He was a real poet, with a great love of external nature, and much delicacy and generosity of sentiment; and had his judgment been matured, would now have been as much admired by the many as he is regarded by the few. His verses are of such unequal merit, that it is difficult to select any long passage, or scarcely, indeed, any short one, that does not contain matter unworthy of him; yet in all may be discerned promise, in many sweetness and beauty, in some grandeur; and there is nobody who loves poets of the Spenser school, but will have a considerable bit of lurking affection, in the green places of his heart, for William Browne, and lament that he did not live to become famous. Much of his Britannia’s Pastorals, as he called them, was written before he was twenty. They were collected into a body of English verse, for the first time, by Anderson; but Davies published an edition in three volumes duodecimo; they have been lately reprinted in two; and the lover of poetry and field-walks, who is not always in a mood for higher stimulants, and who can recognise beauty in a hedge-row elm as well as a forest, may reckon himself lucky in being able to put one of them in his pocket. The pastorals consist of a story with a number of episodes, none of which, or story either, can we ever remember; so we will say nothing more about them. The names of the persons hum in our ears, and we have some conception of two or three of the incidents; but the scenes in which they take place, the landscapes, the pastoral images, the idealised country manners, these are what we are thinking of while the story is going on; just as a man should be hearing some local history while going over meadows and stiles, and glancing all the while about him instead of paying it attention. We shall, therefore, devote this article to passages marked with our pen; as the same man might go over the ground afterwards in other company, and say, “There is the church I spoke of, in the trees”—“Yonder is the passage I mentioned, into the wood”—“Here the ivy full of the singing-birds.” We may, perhaps, overrate Browne, out of affection for the things he likes to speak of; but sometimes his powers are not to be mistaken. He calls Cephalus, whom Aurora loved, him

Whose name was worn
Within the bosom of the blushing morn.

Music is

The soul of art, best loved when love is by.

Raleigh, spoken of under the character of a shepherd, is a swain

Whom all the Graces kissed;

and Pan, a god that

With gentle nymphs in forests high
Kissed out the sweet time of his infancy.

That is very beautiful. Warton, in his History of Poetry, has expressed his admiration of a “charm” in Browne’s Inner Temple Masque, in which, down by the banks of Lethe, dewdrops are said to be for ever hanging

On the limber grass,
Poppy and mandragoras;

and Lethe is described as flowing

Without coil,
Softly, like a stream of oil.

The fourth eclogue of his Shepherd’s Pipe is thought, not improbably, to have been in the recollection of Milton, when he wrote Lycidas. Like that poem, it is an elegy on the death of a friend. The line marked in the following quatrain might have appeared in Lycidas, without any injury to it. It is, indeed, very Miltonic:—

In deepest passions of my grief-swol’n breast,
Sweet soul! this only comfort seizeth me,
That so few years should make thee so much blest,
And give such wings to reach eternity.

In this poem is a description of autumn, in which the different metres are unfortunately but ill-assorted:—they look like bits of elegies begun on different plans; but the third line of the first quatrain is well felt; the fourth not unworthy of it; the watery meadows are capitally painted; and the closing stanza is like an affecting one taken out of some old English ballad:—

Autumn it was, when droop’d the sweetest flowers,
And rivers, swollen with pride, o’erlook’d the banks;
Poor grew the day of summer’s golden hours,
And void of sap stood Ida’s cedar ranks.
The pleasant meadows sadly lay
In chill and cooling sweats
By rising fountains, or as they
Fear’d winter’s wasteful threats.
Against the broad-spread oaks
Each wind in fury bears;
Yet fell their leaves not half so fast
As did the shepherd’s tears.

The feeling of analogy between the oak, with its scattered leaves, and the naturally strong man shedding tears for sorrow, is in the best imaginative taste. Had Browne written all thus, he would have found plenty of commentators. The Shepherd’s Pipe was a somewhat later production than the other pastorals; and had he lived he would probably have surpassed all that his youth produced. Unfortunately, his mind never appears to have outgrown a certain juvenile ambition of ingenious thoughts and conceits; and it is these that render it so difficult to make any long quotation from his works. The sixth line in the following is very obscure, perhaps corrupted. But the rest has great liveliness and nature:—

Look as a lover, with a lingering kiss,
About to part with the best half that’s his;
Fain would he stay, but that he fears to do it,
And curseth time for so fast hastening to it;
Now takes his leave, and yet begins anew
To make less vows than are esteem’d true;
Then says he must be gone, and then doth find
Something he should have spoke that’s out of mind;
And whilst he stands to look for’t in her eyes,
Their sad sweet glance so ties his faculties
To think from what he parts, that he is now
As far from leaving her, or knowing how,
As when he came; begins his former strain,
To kiss, to vow, and take his leave again;
Then turns, comes back, sighs, parts, and yet doth go,
Apt to retire, and loth to leave her so;—
Brave stream, so part I from thy flowery bank.

Browne is fond of drawing his similes from real, and even homely life, and often seems to introduce them for the purpose of giving that kind of variety to a pastoral, otherwise ideal; for though the title of his poem is British, and the scene also, it is in other respects Arcadian and Pagan. The effect is somewhat jarring; and yet it is impossible to quarrel with the particular descriptions:—

As children on a play-day leave the schools,
And gladly run into the swimming pools;
Or in the thickets, all with nettles stung,
Rush to despoil some sweet thrush of her young;
Or with their hats for fish lade in a brook
Withouten pain; but when the morn doth look
Out of the eastern gates, a snail would faster
Glide to the schools, than they unto their master;
So when before I sung the songs of birds, &c.The following is a complete picture:—

—As a nimble squirrel from the wood,
Ranging the hedges for his filbert food,
Sits partly on a bough, his brown nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking,
Till, with their crooks and bags, a sort of boys
To share with him, come with so great a noise,
That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke,
And for his life leap to a neighbour oak,
Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes,
Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes
The boys run dabbling through thick and thin;
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin;
This, torn and tattered, hath with much ado
Got to the briers, and that hath lost his shoe;
This dropt his band, that headlong falls for haste,
Another cries behind for being last;
With sticks and stones, and many a sounding hollow,
The little pool with no small sport they follow,
Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray
Gets to the wood, and hides him in his dray;
Such shift made Riot, ere he could get up, &c.

Here is another picture, still homelier, but equally complete, and as robust in its full-grown strength as the other is light and boyish:—

As when a smith and’s man (lame Vulcan’s fellows),
Called from the anvil or the puffing bellows
To clap a well-wrought shoe, for more than pay,
Upon a stubborn nag of Galloway,
Or unback’d jennet, or a Flanders mare,
That at the forge stands snuffing of the air;
The swarthy smith spits in his buck-horn fist,
And bids his men bring out the five-fold twist,
His shackles, shacklocks, hampers, gyves, and chains,
His linkÈd bolts; and with no little pains
These make him fast; and lest all these should faulter,
Unto a post, with some six-doubled halter,
He binds his head; yet all are of the least
To curb the fury of the headstrong beast;
When, if a carrier’s jade be brought unto him,
His man can hold his foot while he can shoe him;
Remorse was so enforced to bind him stronger.

This is a Dutch picture, or one that Mr. Crabbe might have admired. The following might have adorned the pages of Spenser himself. The ascension of the fogs and mists, and the cessation of all noise, are in a true—nay, in a high spirit of grandeur; and the very delicacy of the conclusion adds to it. The sense of hushing solemnity is drawn to the finest point:—

Now great Hyperion left his golden throne,
That on the dancing waves in glory shone;
For whose declining on the western shore
The oriental hills black mantles wore;
And thence apace the gentle twilight fled,
That had from hideous caverns usherÈd
All-drowsy Night; who in a car of jet,
By steeds of iron-grey (which mainly sweat
Moist drops on all the world) drawn through the sky,
The helps of darkness waited orderly.
First, thick clouds rose from all the liquid plains;
Then mists from marishes, and grounds whose veins
Were conduit-pipes to many a crystal spring;
From standing pools and fens were following
Unhealthy fogs; each river, every rill,
Sent up their vapours to attend her will.
These pitchy curtains drew ’twixt earth and heaven,
And as Night’s chariot through the air was driven,
Clamour grew dumb; unheard was shepherd’s song,
And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongue
Talk’d to the echo; satyrs broke their dance,
And all the upper world lay in a trance;
Only the curling streams soft chidings kept:
And little gales, that from the green leaf swept
Dry summer’s dust, in fearful whisp’ring stirr’d
As loth to waken any singing bird.

Browne was a Devonshire man, and is supposed to have died at Ottery St. Mary, the birthplace of Coleridge. He was not unworthy to have been the countryman of that exquisite observer of Nature, himself a pastoral man, though he wrote no pastorals; for Coleridge not only preferred a country to a town life, but his mind as well as his body (when it was not with Plato and the schoolmen) delighted to live in woody places, “enfolding,” as he beautifully says,

Sunny spots of greenery.

And how many other great and good men have there not been, with whom the humblest lover of Arcady may, in this respect, claim fellowship?—men, nevertheless, fond of town also, and of the most active and busy life, when it was their duty to enter it. The most universal genius must of necessity include the green districts of the world in his circle, otherwise he would not run it a third part round. Shakspeare himself, prosperous manager as he was, retired to his native place before he was old. Do we think that, with all his sociality, his chief companions there were such as a country town afforded? Depend upon it, they were the trees, and the fields, and his daughter Susanna. Be assured, that no gentleman of the place was seen so often pacing the banks of the Avon, sitting on the stiles in the meadows, looking with the thrush at the sunset, or finding

Books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Cervantes, the Shakspeare of Spain, (for if his poetry answered but to one small portion of Shakspeare, his prose made up the rest,) proclaims his truly pastoral heart, notwithstanding his satire, not only in his Galatea, but in a hundred passages of Don Quixote, particularly the episodes. He delighted equally in knowledge of the world and the most ideal poetic life. It is easy to see, by the stories of Marcella and Leandra, that this great writer wanted little to have become a Quixote himself, in the Arcadian line! Nothing but the extremest good sense supplied him a proper balance in this respect for his extreme romance.

Boccaccio was another of these great child-like minds, whose knowledge of the world is ignorantly confounded with a devotion to it. See, in his Admetus, and Theseid, and Genealogia Deorum, &c., and in the Decameron itself, how he revels in groves and gardens; and how, when he begins making a list of trees, he cannot leave off. Doubtless, he had been of a more sensual temperament than Cervantes; but his faith remained unshaken in the highest things. His veins might have contained an excess of the genial; but so did his heart. When the priest threatened him in advanced life with the displeasure of Heaven, he was shocked and alarmed, and obliged to go to Petrarch for comfort.

Chaucer was a courtier, and a companion of princes; nay, a reformer also, and a stirrer out in the world. He understood that world, too, thoroughly, in the ordinary sense of such understanding; yet, as he was a true great poet in everything, so in nothing more was he so than in loving the country, and the trees and fields. It is as hard to get him out of a grove as his friend Boccaccio; and he tells us, that, in May, he would often go out into the meadows to “abide” there, solely in order to “look upon the daisy.” Milton seems to have made a point of never living in a house that had not a garden to it.

A certain amount of trusting goodness, surviving twice the worldly knowledge possessed by those who take scorn for superiority, is the general characteristic of men of this stamp, whether of the highest order of that stamp or not. Cowley, Thomson, and Shenstone were such men. Shenstone was deficient in animal spirits, and condescended to be vexed when people did not come to see his retirement; but few men had an acuter discernment of the weak points of others and the general mistakes of mankind, as anybody may see by his Essays; and yet in those Essays he tells us, that he never passed a town or village, without regretting that he could not make the acquaintance of some of the good people that lived there. Thomson’s whole poetry may be said to be pastoral, and everybody knows what a good fellow he was; how beloved by his friends; how social, and yet how sequestered; and how he preferred a house but a floor high at Richmond (for that which is now shown as his, was then a ground-floor only), to one of more imposing dimensions amidst

The smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call London.

Cowley was a partisan, a courtier, a diplomatist; nay, a satirist, and an admirable one, too. See his Cutter of Coleman Street, the gaiety and sharpness of which no one suspects who thinks of him only in the ordinary peacefulness of his reputation; though, doubtless, he would have been the first man to do a practical kindness to any of the Puritans whom he laughed at. His friends the Cavaliers thought he laughed at themselves, in this very comedy; so much more did he gird hypocrisy and pretension in general than in the particular: but Charles the Second said of him after his death, that he had “not left a better man behind him in England.” His partisanship, his politics, his clever satire, his once admired “metaphysical” poetry, as Johnson calls it, nobody any longer cares about; but still, as Pope said,

We love the language of his heart.

He has become a sort of poetical representative of all the love that existed of groves and gardens in those days—of parterres, and orchards, and stately old houses; but above all, of the cottage; a taste for which, as a gentleman’s residence, seems to have originated with him, or at least been first avowed by him; for we can trace it no farther back. “A small house and a large garden” was his aspiration; and he obtained it. Somebody, unfortunately, has got our Cowley’s Essays—we don’t reproach him, for it is a book to keep a good while; but they contain a delightful passage on this subject, which should have been quoted. Take, however, an extract or two from the verses belonging to those Essays. They will conclude this part of our subject well:

Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!
Hail, ye plebeian underwood!
Where the poetic birds rejoice,
And for their quiet nests and plenteous food,
Pay with their grateful voice.

Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying,
Hear the soft winds above me flying,
With all their wanton boughs dispute,
And the more tuneful birds to both replying,
Nor be myself, too, mute.
Ah! wretched and too solitary he,
Who loves not his own company!
He’ll feel the weight of it many a day,
Unless he call in sin or vanity,
To help to bear ’t away.
******
When Epicurus to the world had taught
That Pleasure was the Chiefest Good,
(And was, perhaps, i’ th’ right, if rightly understood,)
His life he to his doctrine brought,
And in a garden’s shade that sovereign pleasure sought.
******
Where does the wisdom and the power divine
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine—
Where do we finer strokes and colours see
Of the Creator’s real poetry,
Than when we with attention look
Upon the third day’s volume of the book?
If we could open and intend our eye,
We all, like Moses, should espy,
Ev’n in a bush, the radiant Deity.
******
Methinks I see great Diocletian walk
In the Salonian garden’s noble shade,
Which by his own imperial hands was made.
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain
To entice him to a throne again.
“If I, my friends,” said he, “should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
’Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
Than ’tis that you should carry me away;
And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,
Than ever, after the most happy fight,
In triumph to the capitol I rode,
To thank the gods, and to be thought, myself, almost a god.”

A noble line that—long and stately as the triumph which it speaks of. Yet the Emperor and the Poet agreed in preferring a walk down an alley of roses. There was nothing so much calculated to rebuke or bewilder them there, as in the faces of their fellow-creatures, even after the “happiest fight.”