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32 Habington must stand or fall: although he himself took poetry with slight seriousness. "I never set so high a rate upon it as to give myselfe entirely up to its devotion," he once wrote casually; and, of course, in the seventeenth century such an attitude was by no means unusual. Poetry was considered less as a vocation than as a graceful accomplishment, and Milton himself laid aside its composition during those twenty strenuous years from 1640 to 1660. So, like Donne and others, Habington permitted his verses to pass about in private circulation until "importunity prevailed and cleere judgements advis'd" the more permanent form of a printed volume. Then in 1634, Castara was anonymously published, with the author's half-playful assertion that "to write this, love stole some hours from businesse and my more serious study." The verses (which appeared almost simultaneously with Milton's Comus) met with such success that a second edition was called for during the following year, and a third—with additions—in 1640. Since then, Castara has been little known to readers in general, and by the critics little praised. Habington, as we know, was a poet only when some strong emotion—love or grief or religious longing—cast off the bonds of habitual reserve and freed the wings of fancy. In such moments he must be judged; and, because those moments were rare, he cannot be placed among poets of the first order. Yet none could fail to feel the exquisite beauty and sincerity of those lines, beginning:

They are among the most characteristic that