Its late painters, whose human
figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept
a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the
angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a
flock of birds flutter up.
Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace's
poetry:
"This is the palace of the wood,
And court o' the royal oak, where stood
The whole nobility."
In more than one place Lucasta's, or Amarantha's, or Laura's hair
is sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in
Wordsworth's line.
Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow a
book; yet it is but a "hermitage." To shake out the light and
spirit of its leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him,
but to the world.
In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, "you" to
"thou." Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and the
inconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else so
distressing as in this brief and otherwise perfect poem. The fault
is easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lend
him this redress, offered him here as an act of comradeship.
LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES
That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more
lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend
upon the precision of a comma--nay, upon the precision of the voice
in reading.
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