Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/110

 cvi INTRODUCTION ���Even in her gayest days she was incapable temperamentally of drowning grief by an acceptance of the epicurean philoso- phy. Her summary of this doctrine in The Wisdom of Solomon is probably her best heroic verse, but the doctrine itself is vigorously remanded to "th' industrious Devil." It was impossible that carpe diem should be her motto. It was her tendency to look before and after, and her tempta- tion when trials came was to fall into a state of distrust and despair. The shortness of life, the failure of the highest hopes, the prosperity of the wicked, the affliction of the righteous, were facts that stirred her to doubts and ques- tionings, and the supreme religious experience commemorated in her poems is her struggle to interpret and accept sorrow according to the Christian ideal. She persistently describes grief as the line by which every saint is measured, as the furnace fire that tries the gold of true piety, as the only "certain purifying roade" that leads to the Heavenly City. For the earthly life Ardelia's ideal is the via media. Accord- ing to her philosophy " all extreams to their own Ruine haste." To walk quietly and steadily, to hold oneself in hand, to realize that �No Joy a Rapture must create, No Grief beget Despair, �in a word, to have the sources of life independent of externals, is her creed. But in her pictures of the final happiness of victorious saints, her eagerness and longing find expression in phrases more nearly akin to the " enthu- siasm" of Watts and the Wesley s than to the formal morality of her own day. �In an Ode to Cowley Bishop Sprat said, �The Pindar has left his barbarous Greece, and thinks it just �Pindaric To be led by thee to the English shore ; �des An honour to him. �Pindar was, in fact, known to the seventeenth century only ��� �