Part 1
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Transcriber's Notes: 1. This transcription uses _ characters around italic text, ^ to indicate superscripted text, and {} around multi-character superscripts.
2. The author's textual notes occur near the end of the book, before the Index to First Lines.
As an aid to the reader this text uses a different style for references to those notes than the printed edition used.
References to the notes are marked within the text as "[number:number]" and within the textual notes section as "number:number." For example, [2:1] represents the first note in the second poem that has notes; [3:2] represents the second note in the third poem that has notes.
3. Additional Transcriber's Notes occur at the end of the book.
LYRICS: THOMAS STANLEY
Thy numbers carry weight, yet clear and terse, And innocent, as becomes the soul of verse.
_JAMES SHIRLEY: To his honour'd friend Thomas Stanley, Esquire, upon his Elegant Poems._ [1646.]
THOMAS STANLEY:
HIS ORIGINAL LYRICS, COMPLETE, IN THEIR COLLATED READINGS OF 1647, 1651, 1657.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION, TEXTUAL NOTES, A LIST OF EDITIONS, AN APPENDIX OF TRANSLATIONS, AND A PORTRAIT.
EDITED BY L. I. GUINEY
J. R. TUTIN HULL 1907
TO C. N. G. IN MEMORY OF AN OXFORD WINTER
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE xi
I. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1647: The Dream 1 Despair 1 The Picture 2 Opinion 2
II. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1651: The Cure 4 To the Countess of S[underland?] with _The Holy Court_ 6 Drawn for Valentine by the L[ady] D[orothy] S[pencer?] 7
III. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITION OF 1657 [JOHN GAMBLE'S _Ayres and Dialogues_] HAVING NO TITLES:
'On this swelling bank' 9 'Dear, fold me once more' 10 'The lazy hours' 10
IV. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1651: Love's Innocence 12 The Dedication to Love 13 The Glow-Worm 13 To Chariessa, desiring her to Burn his Verses 14 On Mr. Fletcher's Works 15 To the Lady D[ormer] 16 To Mr. W[illiam] Hammond 17 On Mr. Shirley's Poems 18 On Mr. Sherburne's Translation of Seneca's Medea, and Vindication of the Author 20 On Mr. Hall's Essays 21 On Sir J[ohn] S[uckling] his Picture and Poems 22 Answer [to 'The Union'] 22
V. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1657 [GAMBLE]: The Blush 24 The Cold Kiss 25 The Idolater 25 The Magnet 26 On a Violet in her Breast 27 Song: 'Foolish Lover, go and seek' 28 The Parting 29 Counsel 29 Expostulation with Love, in Despair 30 Song: 'Faith, 'tis not worth thy pains and care' 31 Expectation 32
VI. LYRICS PRINTED IN ALL ORIGINAL EDITIONS OF STANLEY: The Breath 33 The Night: a Dialogue 34 Unalter'd by Sickness 35 To Celia, Excuse for Wishing her less Fair 36 Celia, Sleeping or Singing 37 Palinode 37 The Return 38 Chang'd, yet Constant 39 To Chariessa, Beholding Herself in a Glass 41 Song: 'When I lie burning in thine eye' 42 Song: 'Fool! take up thy shaft again' 43 Delay 43 The Repulse 44 Song: 'Celinda, by what potent art' 45 The Tomb 46 To Celia, Pleading Want of Merit 48 The Kiss 49 The Snowball 50 Speaking and Kissing 50 The Deposition 51 Love's Heretic 52 La Belle Confidante 54 La Belle Ennemie 55 Love Deposed 56 The Divorce 57 The Bracelet 58 The Farewell 59 The Exchange: Dialogue 60 The Exequies 61 The Silkworm 62 Ambition 62 Song: 'When, dearest Beauty, thou shalt pay' 63 Song: 'I will not trust thy tempting graces' 64 Song: 'No, I will sooner trust the wind' 65 Song: 'I prithee let my heart alone!' 65 The Loss 66 The Self-Cruel 67 An Answer to a Song, 'Wert thou much [?] fairer than thou art,' by Mr. W. M. 68 The Relapse 69
APPENDIX:
A SHEAF OF TRANSLATIONS: The Revenge [Ronsard] 71 Claim to Love [Guarini] 72 The Sick Lover [Guarini] 72 Time Recover'd [Casone] 73 Song: 'I languish in a silent flame' [De Voiture] 73 Apollo and Daphne [Marino] 74 Song: Torment of absence and delay [Montalvan] 75 A Lady Weeping [Montalvan] 75 To his Mistress in Absence [Tasso] 76 The Hasty Kiss [Secundus] 76 Song: 'When thou thy pliant arms' [Secundus] 77 Song: ''Tis no kiss' [Secundus] 77 Translations from Anacreon: I. The Chase: 'With a Whip of lilies, Love' 78 II. 'Vex no more thyself and me' 78 III. The Spring: 'See, the Spring herself discloses' 79 IV. The Combat: 'Now will I a lover be' 79 V. 'On this verdant lotus laid' 80 E Catalectis Vet[erum] Poet[arum] 81 Seven Epigrams [Plato]: I. Upon one named Aster 81 II. Upon Aster's Death 81 III. On Dion, engraved on his Tomb at Syracuse 82 IV. On Alexis 82 V. On Archaeanassa 82 VI. Love Sleeping 82 VII. On a Seal 83
TEXTUAL NOTES 85
A LIST OF EDITIONS OF THOMAS STANLEY'S POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS 101
INDEX TO FIRST LINES 107
PREFATORY NOTE
Thomas Stanley's quiet life began in 1625, the year of the accession of that King whom English poets have loved most. He came, though in the illegitimate line, from the great Stanleys, Earls of Derby. His father, descended from Edward, third Earl, was Sir Thomas Stanley of Leytonstone, Essex, and Cumberlow, Hertfordshire; and his mother was Mary, daughter to Sir William Hammond of St. Alban's Court, Nonington, near Canterbury. Following the almost unbroken law of the heredity of genius, Stanley derived his chief mental qualities from his mother; and through her he was nearly related to the poets George Sandys, William Hammond, Sir John Marsham the chronologer, Richard Lovelace and his less famous brother; as, through his father, to a fellow-poet perhaps dearer to him than any of these, Sir Edward Sherburne.
His tutor, at home, not at College, was William Fairfax, son of the translator of Tasso. With translation in his own blood, that accomplished and affectionate gentleman succeeded in inspiring his forward charge with a taste for the same rather thankless game, and with a love of modern foreign classics which he never lost. It was thrown at Stanley, afterwards, that in courting the Muses, he had profited only too well by Fairfax's aid: but the charge, if ever a serious one at all, was absurdly ill-founded. It may have been based on a wrong reading of that very generous acknowledgement beginning: 'If we are one, dear friend,' which is printed in this volume; for the muddled misconstruing mind has existed in every intellectual society. Nothing is plainer than that Stanley, both by right of natural genius and of fastidious scholarship, was more than capable of beating his music out alone.
The boy was sent to Pembroke College, Cambridge, before he was fifteen, and was entered as a gentleman commoner of that University, passing by no means unmarked among a brilliant generation; and there, in 1641 he graduated Master of Arts, being incorporated at Oxford in the same degree. He next set out, like all youths of his rank and age, upon that 'grand tour' which was still a perilous business. He returned to England in the full fury of the great Civil contest (his family having emigrated to France, meanwhile), and settled down to work, not forensic, but literary, in the Middle Temple. There he fell to editing AEschylus, turning Anacreon into English, and planning the beginnings of his _History of Philosophy_. Best of all, he wrote, at leisure and by liking, his charming verses. Contemporaries not a few practised this same notable detachment, building nests, as it were, in the cannon's mouth. Choosing the contemplative life, Stanley, like William Habington and Drummond of Hawthornden, was shut in with his mental activities, while many others whom they knew and whom we know, poor gay sparks of Parnassus, were dimming and blunting themselves on bloody fields. Like Habington and Drummond also in this, he was, though a passive Royalist, Royalist to the core. His _Psalterium Carolinum_ ([Greek: Eikon Basilike] in metre), published three years before the Restoration, proves at least that if he were a non-combatant for the cause he believed in, he was no timid truckler to the power which crushed it. In London he seems to have lived throughout the war, suffering and surviving in the smallpox epidemic. He had married early, and, according to all evidence, most happily. His wife was Dorothy, daughter and co-heiress of Sir James Enyon, Baronet, of Flore, or Flower, Northamptonshire. (It is curious, one may note in passing, that Thomas Stanley in the Oxford University Register is entered as an incorporated Cantabrigian 'of Flowre, Northants.' This was in his seventeenth year, when it is highly improbable that any property there could have been made over to him, unless with reference to his betrothal to Dorothy Enyon, then a child.) One of Stanley's devoted poetic circle joyfully salutes them on the birth of their second son, Sidney,
'Ere both the parents forty summers told,'
as equal paragons. 'You two,' sings Hammond, 'who are in worthiness so near allied.' They enjoyed, together, a comfortable fortune, and gave even more generously, in proportion, than they had received. All Stanley's tastes and habits were humanistic. He was the loyal and helpful friend of many English men of letters. To name his familiar associates is to call up a bright and thoughtful pageant, for they include, besides Lovelace and Suckling and Sherburne, the Bromes; James Shirley; John Davies of Kidwelly; John Hall of Durham, better remembered now as the friend of Hobbes than as the prodigy his generation thought him; and the genial Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton. Though Stanley knew how to protest manfully when the profits of his mental labours were in danger of being withdrawn from him, yet he sought none of the usual awards of life, and never increased his patrimony. Indeed, his relative William Wotton said of him long after, in a Latin notice written for _Elogia Gallorum_, that Stanley lived engrossed in his studies, and let his private interests run to seed. He kept his learning and his liberty, his charity and peace and good repute; and of his troubles and trials he has left, like the gallant philosopher he was, no record at all. A little brass in the chancel pavement of Clothall Church, near Baldock, witnesses to some of these: for there 'Thomas et Dorothea, parentes moesti,' laid two little sons to rest ... 'sit nomen Dnyi benedictum.' They lost other children, later; but one son and three daughters survived their gentle father, when, after a severe illness, he was called away from a society which bitterly deplored him, in April, 1678. He died in Suffolk Street, London, in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Stanley was supposed by his contemporaries to have made himself immortal by his _History of Philosophy_, long a standard book, though hardly an original one. Indeed, they considered him, chiefly on account of it, 'the glory and admiration of his time': the phrase is that of a careful critic, Winstanley. The work went into many editions; his prose was used and read, while his verse was talked of, and passed lightly from hand to hand. As in the case of Petrarca, whose fine Latin tomes quickly perished, while his less regarded vernacular _Rime_ rose to shine 'on the stretched forefinger of all Time,' so here was a little remainder of lovely English song to embalm an otherwise soon-buried name. Hardly any poet of his poetic day, to be discovered hereafter, can be appraised on a more intimate understanding, or can awaken a more endearing interest. Yet we know that save for one or two of his pieces extant here or there in anthologies; save for a private reprint in 1814 by that tireless scholar and 'great mouser,' Sir Egerton Brydges; save for Mr. A. H. Bullen's valued reproduction of the _Anacreontea_, in 1893, Thomas Stanley's name is utterly unknown to the modern world.
We have indeed travelled far from the ideals of the seventeenth century. Perhaps, after all, that is one of our blunders; for every hour, nowadays, we are busy breaking a backward path through the historic underbrush, in order to speak with those singing gentlemen of 'the Warres,' whose art and statecraft and religion some of us (who have seen the end of so much else), find incredibly attractive to our own. Their lawless vision, like that of children, and the mysterious trick of music in all their speech, are things we love instinctively, and never can regain. Out of their political storm, their hard thought, and high spirits, they can somehow give us rest: and it is chiefly rest which we crave of them. We appeal to each of these post-Elizabethans with the invitatory line of one of them:
'Charm me asleep with thy delicious numbers!'
The pleasure they can still give is inexhaustible, for unconscious genius like theirs, however narrow, is a deeper well than Goethe's. Cast aside, and contemned, and left in the darkness long ago, the greater number of these English Alexandrians are as alive as the lamp in Tullia's tomb; and of these Stanley, as a craftsman, is almost first.
He was a born man of letters; he gave his whole life to meditation, to friendship, and to art; he did his beautiful best, and cared nothing for results; and though literary dynasties have come and gone, his work has sufficient vitality to-day to leap abreast of work which has never been out of the sphere of man's appreciation, and has deserved all the appreciation which it got. Stanley's fastidious strength, his wayward but concentrated grace, his spirit of liberty and scorn in writing of love (which was one of the novel characteristic notes of Wither's generation, and of Robert Jones's before him); the sunny, fearless mental motion, like that of a bird flying not far, but high, seem to our plodding scientific wits as unnatural as a Sibyllic intoxication. He strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range; but within these, he is for the most part as happy as Herrick, as mellow as Henry King, as free as Carew, and as capable as these were, and as those deeper natures, Crashaw and Vaughan, were not, of a short poem perfect throughout. He is the child of his age, moreover, in that his ingenuity never slumbers, and his speech must ever be concise and knotty. If he sports in the tangles of Neraea's hair, it is because he likes tangles, and means to add to them. No Carolian poet was ever an idler!
Carew, perhaps, is Stanley's nearest parallel. The latter shows the very same sort of golden pertness, masked in languid elegance, which goes to unify and heighten Carew's memorable enchantment, and the same sheer singable felicity of phrase. But, unlike Carew, he has no glorious ungoverned swift-passing raptures; there is in Stanley less fire and less tenderness. Nor has he anything to repent of. His imagination, as John Hall discerningly said of it,
'Makes soft Ionic turn grave Lydian.'
Except Habington's, no considerable body of amatory verse in all that century, certainly not even Cowley's more artificial sequence of 1647, is, on the whole, so free from stain. Stanley's exemption did not pass unnoticed; and William Fairfax ('no man fitter!') is careful to instruct us that Doris, Celinda, and Chariessa were 'various rays' of 'one orient sun,' and further, that 'no coy ambitious names may here imagine earthly flames,' because the poet's professional and deliberate homage was really paid to inward beauty, and never to 'roses of the cheek' alone. Here we run up against a sweet and famous moral of Carew's, which not Carew, but Stanley, bears out as the better symbolist of the two. Our poet does not appear to have contributed towards the religious literature of a day when the torrent of intense life in human hearts bred so much heaven-mounting spray, as well as so much necessary scum and refuse. But his was a temperament so religious that one almost expects to find somewhere a manuscript volume of 'pious thoughts,' the shy fruit of Stanley's Christian 'retirements' at home. It will be noticed that there is one sad devotional poem in this book, 'The lazy hours move slow'; and as it appears only in John Gamble's book, 1657, it may fairly be inferred that it was written later than the other lyrics. In 1657 Stanley was two-and-thirty, and his singing-time, so far as we know, was over. He had discharged it well. He fails where any true artist may ever be expected to fail, in verses occasional and complimentary. But, to balance this, he is often exceptionally happy when translating.
His portrait, in middle age, by Faithorne after Lely, commends him to us all as quite worthy of the affection and applause which surrounded him from his youth, and never spoiled him. Brown-haired, hazel-eyed, fresh-cheeked, serene rather than gay, he seems the very incarnation of the ideal for which many others, less fortunate, hungered in that vexed England: the man 'innocent and quiet,' whose 'mind to him a kingdom is,' whose 'treasure is in Minerva's tower,' and 'who in the region of himself remains.' Through the Civil struggle, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, he had followed a way of peace, without blame, and he is almost the only poet of the stormy time who is absolutely unaffected by it. He, at least, need not be discounted as a pathetic broken crystal: he can be judged on his own little plot of ground, without allowances, and by our strictest modern standards. His light bright best, his _viridaria_, have borne victoriously the lava-drift of nearly three centuries. An amorist of even temper and of malice prepense, a railer with a sound heart, an untyrannic master of his Muse, Stanley sings low to his small jocund lyre, and need not be too curiously questioned about his sincerity. How can it matter? He gives delight; he deserves the bays.
This little book is the first complete reprint of Stanley ever published: it is his original and inclusive output. The text is a new text, inasmuch as it represents the Editor's choice of readings, among many variants; but variants are noted throughout, and by their number and interest tell their own tale of Stanley's exacting and sure taste. A few translated lyrics are gathered into an Appendix. The title-pages of his few volumes will be found cited in the accompanying List of Editions.