FOLLOW
Campion's "airs," for which he wrote his words, laid rules too
urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The
airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave
to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play,
hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas
for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety
that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion
began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for
example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line,
"touching in its majesty"-
"Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!"
Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging
stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are
speechless, with these two final lines -
"If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!"
Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.
"Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me"
is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single
gloom in this -
"Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!"
And a single joy in this -
"Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!"
Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion
the author of Cherry Ripe -
"A thousand cherubim fly in her looks.
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