Page:Tixall Poetry.djvu/382

 Whoever was the author, he has succeeded very well in describing the mixed emotions of passionate love, of indignation, sorrow, and despair, which may be supposed to have agitated the breast of Mary Magdalen, while standing at the foot of the cross.

At the end of the fifth stanza, the poet has given us a specimen of the taste of his contemporaries; who, instead of the simple and natural expression of sublimity, and pathos, of fancy and feeling, were delighted with nothing so much as a pedantic display of deep erudition, and with illustrations, drawn from the most abstruse and difficult parts of science. Flights of imagination, beautiful imagery, delicacy of sentiment, and elegance of language, were all to be sacrificed to far-fetched conceits, remote allusions, metaphysical subtleties, and quaint combinations of the most incongruous ideas. Their oracular language was frequently quite unintelligible. The poems of Donne, Cleaveland, and Cowley, which at this period enjoyed the highest popularity, exhibit abundant proofs of the truth of this assertion.

In these lines,

the poet means to compare the tears of the Magdalen, to "christall waves;" and the blood of Christ to the Red Sea, called from the Greek, ιρυθρον, red, "Erithre." But then recollecting, that rocks of coral, and beds of pearls, are common in the Red Sea, and the neighbouring waters, be makes her declare, by a double comparison, that without the "corall dropps" of his blood the cristall waves" of her tears cannot properly be called a sea, nor his blood a Red Sea without the pearls of her tears!

It is but justice to the authors of the poetry in this volume to remark, that there are fewer of these extravagant absurdities in their compositions than in most of the poems of the writers just mentioned.

The last stanza is eminently beautiful. It recalls to my mind those figures of the Magdalen which are to be seen in pictures of the crucifixion by some of the