Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/109

 INTRODUCTION cv ���was not only outside the compass of her lyre, but typified a bacchanalian excess that aroused her strongest disapproval. According to her theory, which is not without a certain novel pungency, wine makes of the heart " an inaccessible island " to which no nymph need try to win her way. �Ardelia's best songs are not in Prior's vein at all. The Losse, A Sigh, The Progress of Life, are marked by a strain of tender, subdued melancholy as natural to Ardelia as the flippant gayety of the conventional love-song was alien to her. To Grief, a little poem inspired by the troubles of 1688, has dignity, reserve, and genuine pathos. It is in sad little poems, the direct and simple outcome of her own expe- rience, that her lyric impulse finds most nearly adequate expression. �Lady Winchilsea's religious poems are nearly all direct paraphrases from Scripture passages, or they are so saturated i^ Religious with biblical phraseology as to read like para- �Poems phrases. In such poems the simplicity and �literary distinction of the original must always make the smoothest pindaric, or stanzaic, or heroic reproductions seem, to say the least, superfluous. But aside from this objection, Ardelia's religious poetry is of especial interest. The delight with which she wrote it resulted in an unusual vigor and variety of versification. And in mood and theme these poems contribute much to a statement of her philosophy of life. The bitter and almost contemptuous resume of human ambitions and attainments that characterizes the early work of both Mary of Modena's rhyming maids of honor seems to have been a genuine expression of opinion. The lament of the preacher was a view of life quite natural to detached and sober-minded observers in the reign of Charles II. But philosophic pessimism was not to be Ardelia's permanent mental attitude. Definite trials soon brought her face to face with spiritual experiences of a more personal sort. ��� �