Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/89

A BELT OF ASTEROIDS measures of that grandest and most solemn of our minor poesies, "Death's Final Conquest,"

while the feeling and theme of the two lyrics are alike, and, though each is perfect in itself, they read like portions of a divided poem. And Waller's name is still popularly connected with "Go, Lovely Rose," and "On a Girdle," out of the whole mass of his songs, epistles, epitaphs, and panegyrics, though Professor Lowell, in his delightful citation of Dryden, and perhaps animated by that scorn of Waller's truckling which every true and noble poet must feel, says that the latter has lived mainly on the credit of a single couplet in the lines closing his "Divine Poesy."

The late English period, however, is all that I can glance at. To mention John Logan is to revive the "Ode to the Cuckoo," yet 'tis by no means certain that Logan did not refine this standard poem from the crude metal left by his friend Michael Bruce. His song on a wild old theme, touched by so many melodists, "The dowie dens of Yarrow," deserves as long a reputation; though of all the Yarrow ballads, that by William Hamilton, "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonnie, bonnie bride!" is the nonpareil. Every one has been affected by the simplicity, music, and exquisite pathos of Caroline Oliphant, the Baroness Nairn's "Land o' the Leal": [75]