Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/43

Rh ; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne, written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife—"Now, Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy deservings"—and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also are Southwell's words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.

It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of life—not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness—that was the Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of the act of dying. With this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself. Those two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable. They never wearied of the wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirely different emotion for death as parting. It was not parting that the lyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death. None of our contemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than the ordinary conviction of the matter.