Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/40

26 she dances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily sung to such grave notes.

So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only. She may thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is " brown." She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis. The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than the brown.

Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstant with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day; and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady. She refused to observe the transiency of roses; she never really intended—much as she was urged—to be a shepherdess; she was never persuaded to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let her disappear. She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in the epigram of many a final couplet; and of these the last has been long written. Her