Page:Points of view (Repplier).djvu/53

Rh

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more."

In the still more beautiful lines, "To Althea from Prison," passion, made dignified by suffering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, happy with his chains:—

In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, revealing the finer grain of that impetuous soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the stormy waters of life. Whether we think of Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptuous court, or as dying of want in a cellar; whether we picture him as sighing at the feet of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country and his king; whether he is winning all hearts by the resistless charms of voice and presence, or returning broken from battle to suffer the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we know that in his two famous lyrics we possess the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, of that troubled and many-sided existence. A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir