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Transcriber's Notes:
  1. This transcription uses _ characters around italic text,
     ^ to indicate superscripted text, and {} around multi-character
     superscripts.

  2. The author's textual notes occur near the end of the book, before
     the Index to First Lines.

     As an aid to the reader this text uses a different style for
     references to those notes than the printed edition used.

     References to the notes are marked within the text as
     "[number:number]" and within the textual notes section as
     "number:number." For example, [2:1] represents the first note in
     the second poem that has notes; [3:2] represents the second note
     in the third poem that has notes.

  3. Additional Transcriber's Notes occur at the end of the book.




LYRICS: THOMAS STANLEY




  Thy numbers carry weight, yet clear and terse,
  And innocent, as becomes the soul of verse.

                    _JAMES SHIRLEY: To his honour'd
                     friend Thomas Stanley, Esquire,
                     upon his Elegant Poems._ [1646.]

[Illustration: _Thomas Stanley (1625-1678)_]




  THOMAS STANLEY:

  HIS ORIGINAL LYRICS, COMPLETE,
  IN THEIR COLLATED READINGS OF
  1647, 1651, 1657.


  WITH AN INTRODUCTION, TEXTUAL NOTES,
  A LIST OF EDITIONS, AN APPENDIX OF
  TRANSLATIONS, AND A PORTRAIT.


  EDITED BY
  L. I. GUINEY



  J. R. TUTIN
  HULL
  1907




  TO
  C. N. G.
  IN MEMORY OF AN OXFORD WINTER




CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE

PREFATORY NOTE                                                        xi

  I. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1647:
     The Dream                                                         1
     Despair                                                           1
     The Picture                                                       2
     Opinion                                                           2

 II. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1651:
     The Cure                                                          4
     To the Countess of S[underland?] with _The Holy
       Court_                                                          6
     Drawn for Valentine by the L[ady] D[orothy]
       S[pencer?]                                                      7

III. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITION OF 1657 [JOHN
       GAMBLE'S _Ayres and Dialogues_] HAVING NO TITLES:

     'On this swelling bank'                                           9
     'Dear, fold me once more'                                        10
     'The lazy hours'                                                 10

 IV. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1651:
     Love's Innocence                                                 12
     The Dedication to Love                                           13
     The Glow-Worm                                                    13
     To Chariessa, desiring her to Burn his Verses                    14
     On Mr. Fletcher's Works                                          15
     To the Lady D[ormer]                                             16
     To Mr. W[illiam] Hammond                                         17
     On Mr. Shirley's Poems                                           18
     On Mr. Sherburne's Translation of Seneca's Medea,
       and Vindication of the Author                                  20
     On Mr. Hall's Essays                                             21
     On Sir J[ohn] S[uckling] his Picture and Poems                   22
     Answer [to 'The Union']                                          22

  V. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1657
      [GAMBLE]:
     The Blush                                                        24
     The Cold Kiss                                                    25
     The Idolater                                                     25
     The Magnet                                                       26
     On a Violet in her Breast                                        27
     Song: 'Foolish Lover, go and seek'                               28
     The Parting                                                      29
     Counsel                                                          29
     Expostulation with Love, in Despair                              30
     Song: 'Faith, 'tis not worth thy pains and care'                 31
     Expectation                                                      32

 VI. LYRICS PRINTED IN ALL ORIGINAL EDITIONS OF
       STANLEY:
     The Breath                                                       33
     The Night: a Dialogue                                            34
     Unalter'd by Sickness                                            35
     To Celia, Excuse for Wishing her less Fair                       36
     Celia, Sleeping or Singing                                       37
     Palinode                                                         37
     The Return                                                       38
     Chang'd, yet Constant                                            39
     To Chariessa, Beholding Herself in a Glass                       41
     Song: 'When I lie burning in thine eye'                          42
     Song: 'Fool! take up thy shaft again'                            43
     Delay                                                            43
     The Repulse                                                      44
     Song: 'Celinda, by what potent art'                              45
     The Tomb                                                         46
     To Celia, Pleading Want of Merit                                 48
     The Kiss                                                         49
     The Snowball                                                     50
     Speaking and Kissing                                             50
     The Deposition                                                   51
     Love's Heretic                                                   52
     La Belle Confidante                                              54
     La Belle Ennemie                                                 55
     Love Deposed                                                     56
     The Divorce                                                      57
     The Bracelet                                                     58
     The Farewell                                                     59
     The Exchange: Dialogue                                           60
     The Exequies                                                     61
     The Silkworm                                                     62
     Ambition                                                         62
     Song: 'When, dearest Beauty, thou shalt pay'                     63
     Song: 'I will not trust thy tempting graces'                     64
     Song: 'No, I will sooner trust the wind'                         65
     Song: 'I prithee let my heart alone!'                            65
     The Loss                                                         66
     The Self-Cruel                                                   67
     An Answer to a Song, 'Wert thou much [?] fairer
       than thou art,' by Mr. W. M.                                   68
     The Relapse                                                      69

APPENDIX:

A SHEAF OF TRANSLATIONS:
     The Revenge [Ronsard]                                            71
     Claim to Love [Guarini]                                          72
     The Sick Lover [Guarini]                                         72
     Time Recover'd [Casone]                                          73
     Song: 'I languish in a silent flame' [De Voiture]                73
     Apollo and Daphne [Marino]                                       74
     Song: Torment of absence and delay [Montalvan]                   75
     A Lady Weeping [Montalvan]                                       75
     To his Mistress in Absence [Tasso]                               76
     The Hasty Kiss [Secundus]                                        76
     Song: 'When thou thy pliant arms' [Secundus]                     77
     Song: ''Tis no kiss' [Secundus]                                  77
     Translations from Anacreon:
           I. The Chase: 'With a Whip of lilies, Love'                78
          II. 'Vex no more thyself and me'                            78
         III. The Spring: 'See, the Spring herself discloses'         79
          IV. The Combat: 'Now will I a lover be'                     79
           V. 'On this verdant lotus laid'                            80
     E Catalectis Vet[erum] Poet[arum]                                81
     Seven Epigrams [Plato]:
           I. Upon one named Aster                                    81
          II. Upon Aster's Death                                      81
         III. On Dion, engraved on his Tomb at Syracuse               82
          IV. On Alexis                                               82
           V. On Archaeanassa                                         82
          VI. Love Sleeping                                           82
         VII. On a Seal                                               83

TEXTUAL NOTES                                                         85

A LIST OF EDITIONS OF THOMAS STANLEY'S POEMS AND
    TRANSLATIONS                                                     101

INDEX TO FIRST LINES                                                 107




PREFATORY NOTE


Thomas Stanley's quiet life began in 1625, the year of the accession of
that King whom English poets have loved most. He came, though in the
illegitimate line, from the great Stanleys, Earls of Derby. His father,
descended from Edward, third Earl, was Sir Thomas Stanley of
Leytonstone, Essex, and Cumberlow, Hertfordshire; and his mother was
Mary, daughter to Sir William Hammond of St. Alban's Court, Nonington,
near Canterbury. Following the almost unbroken law of the heredity of
genius, Stanley derived his chief mental qualities from his mother; and
through her he was nearly related to the poets George Sandys, William
Hammond, Sir John Marsham the chronologer, Richard Lovelace and his less
famous brother; as, through his father, to a fellow-poet perhaps dearer
to him than any of these, Sir Edward Sherburne.

His tutor, at home, not at College, was William Fairfax, son of the
translator of Tasso. With translation in his own blood, that
accomplished and affectionate gentleman succeeded in inspiring his
forward charge with a taste for the same rather thankless game, and
with a love of modern foreign classics which he never lost. It was
thrown at Stanley, afterwards, that in courting the Muses, he had
profited only too well by Fairfax's aid: but the charge, if ever a
serious one at all, was absurdly ill-founded. It may have been based on
a wrong reading of that very generous acknowledgement beginning: 'If we
are one, dear friend,' which is printed in this volume; for the muddled
misconstruing mind has existed in every intellectual society. Nothing is
plainer than that Stanley, both by right of natural genius and of
fastidious scholarship, was more than capable of beating his music out
alone.

The boy was sent to Pembroke College, Cambridge, before he was fifteen,
and was entered as a gentleman commoner of that University, passing by
no means unmarked among a brilliant generation; and there, in 1641 he
graduated Master of Arts, being incorporated at Oxford in the same
degree. He next set out, like all youths of his rank and age, upon that
'grand tour' which was still a perilous business. He returned to England
in the full fury of the great Civil contest (his family having emigrated
to France, meanwhile), and settled down to work, not forensic, but
literary, in the Middle Temple. There he fell to editing AEschylus,
turning Anacreon into English, and planning the beginnings of his
_History of Philosophy_. Best of all, he wrote, at leisure and by
liking, his charming verses. Contemporaries not a few practised this
same notable detachment, building nests, as it were, in the cannon's
mouth. Choosing the contemplative life, Stanley, like William Habington
and Drummond of Hawthornden, was shut in with his mental activities,
while many others whom they knew and whom we know, poor gay sparks of
Parnassus, were dimming and blunting themselves on bloody fields. Like
Habington and Drummond also in this, he was, though a passive Royalist,
Royalist to the core. His _Psalterium Carolinum_ ([Greek: Eikon
Basilike] in metre), published three years before the Restoration,
proves at least that if he were a non-combatant for the cause he
believed in, he was no timid truckler to the power which crushed it. In
London he seems to have lived throughout the war, suffering and
surviving in the smallpox epidemic. He had married early, and, according
to all evidence, most happily. His wife was Dorothy, daughter and
co-heiress of Sir James Enyon, Baronet, of Flore, or Flower,
Northamptonshire. (It is curious, one may note in passing, that Thomas
Stanley in the Oxford University Register is entered as an incorporated
Cantabrigian 'of Flowre, Northants.' This was in his seventeenth year,
when it is highly improbable that any property there could have been
made over to him, unless with reference to his betrothal to Dorothy
Enyon, then a child.) One of Stanley's devoted poetic circle joyfully
salutes them on the birth of their second son, Sidney,

     'Ere both the parents forty summers told,'

as equal paragons. 'You two,' sings Hammond, 'who are in worthiness so
near allied.' They enjoyed, together, a comfortable fortune, and gave
even more generously, in proportion, than they had received. All
Stanley's tastes and habits were humanistic. He was the loyal and
helpful friend of many English men of letters. To name his familiar
associates is to call up a bright and thoughtful pageant, for they
include, besides Lovelace and Suckling and Sherburne, the Bromes; James
Shirley; John Davies of Kidwelly; John Hall of Durham, better remembered
now as the friend of Hobbes than as the prodigy his generation thought
him; and the genial Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton. Though
Stanley knew how to protest manfully when the profits of his mental
labours were in danger of being withdrawn from him, yet he sought none
of the usual awards of life, and never increased his patrimony. Indeed,
his relative William Wotton said of him long after, in a Latin notice
written for _Elogia Gallorum_, that Stanley lived engrossed in his
studies, and let his private interests run to seed. He kept his learning
and his liberty, his charity and peace and good repute; and of his
troubles and trials he has left, like the gallant philosopher he was, no
record at all. A little brass in the chancel pavement of Clothall
Church, near Baldock, witnesses to some of these: for there 'Thomas et
Dorothea, parentes moesti,' laid two little sons to rest...'sit nomen
Dnyi benedictum.' They lost other children, later; but one son and three
daughters survived their gentle father, when, after a severe illness, he
was called away from a society which bitterly deplored him, in April,
1678. He died in Suffolk Street, London, in the parish of St.
Martin-in-the-Fields.

Stanley was supposed by his contemporaries to have made himself immortal
by his _History of Philosophy_, long a standard book, though hardly an
original one. Indeed, they considered him, chiefly on account of it,
'the glory and admiration of his time': the phrase is that of a careful
critic, Winstanley. The work went into many editions; his prose was used
and read, while his verse was talked of, and passed lightly from hand to
hand. As in the case of Petrarca, whose fine Latin tomes quickly
perished, while his less regarded vernacular _Rime_ rose to shine 'on
the stretched forefinger of all Time,' so here was a little remainder of
lovely English song to embalm an otherwise soon-buried name. Hardly any
poet of his poetic day, to be discovered hereafter, can be appraised on
a more intimate understanding, or can awaken a more endearing interest.
Yet we know that save for one or two of his pieces extant here or there
in anthologies; save for a private reprint in 1814 by that tireless
scholar and 'great mouser,' Sir Egerton Brydges; save for Mr. A. H.
Bullen's valued reproduction of the _Anacreontea_, in 1893, Thomas
Stanley's name is utterly unknown to the modern world.

We have indeed travelled far from the ideals of the seventeenth century.
Perhaps, after all, that is one of our blunders; for every hour,
nowadays, we are busy breaking a backward path through the historic
underbrush, in order to speak with those singing gentlemen of 'the
Warres,' whose art and statecraft and religion some of us (who have seen
the end of so much else), find incredibly attractive to our own. Their
lawless vision, like that of children, and the mysterious trick of
music in all their speech, are things we love instinctively, and never
can regain. Out of their political storm, their hard thought, and high
spirits, they can somehow give us rest: and it is chiefly rest which we
crave of them. We appeal to each of these post-Elizabethans with the
invitatory line of one of them:

     'Charm me asleep with thy delicious numbers!'

The pleasure they can still give is inexhaustible, for unconscious
genius like theirs, however narrow, is a deeper well than Goethe's. Cast
aside, and contemned, and left in the darkness long ago, the greater
number of these English Alexandrians are as alive as the lamp in
Tullia's tomb; and of these Stanley, as a craftsman, is almost first.

He was a born man of letters; he gave his whole life to meditation, to
friendship, and to art; he did his beautiful best, and cared nothing for
results; and though literary dynasties have come and gone, his work has
sufficient vitality to-day to leap abreast of work which has never been
out of the sphere of man's appreciation, and has deserved all the
appreciation which it got. Stanley's fastidious strength, his wayward
but concentrated grace, his spirit of liberty and scorn in writing of
love (which was one of the novel characteristic notes of Wither's
generation, and of Robert Jones's before him); the sunny, fearless
mental motion, like that of a bird flying not far, but high, seem to our
plodding scientific wits as unnatural as a Sibyllic intoxication. He
strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range; but
within these, he is for the most part as happy as Herrick, as mellow as
Henry King, as free as Carew, and as capable as these were, and as those
deeper natures, Crashaw and Vaughan, were not, of a short poem perfect
throughout. He is the child of his age, moreover, in that his ingenuity
never slumbers, and his speech must ever be concise and knotty. If he
sports in the tangles of Neraea's hair, it is because he likes tangles,
and means to add to them. No Carolian poet was ever an idler!

Carew, perhaps, is Stanley's nearest parallel. The latter shows the very
same sort of golden pertness, masked in languid elegance, which goes to
unify and heighten Carew's memorable enchantment, and the same sheer
singable felicity of phrase. But, unlike Carew, he has no glorious
ungoverned swift-passing raptures; there is in Stanley less fire and
less tenderness. Nor has he anything to repent of. His imagination, as
John Hall discerningly said of it,

     'Makes soft Ionic turn grave Lydian.'

Except Habington's, no considerable body of amatory verse in all that
century, certainly not even Cowley's more artificial sequence of 1647,
is, on the whole, so free from stain. Stanley's exemption did not pass
unnoticed; and William Fairfax ('no man fitter!') is careful to instruct
us that Doris, Celinda, and Chariessa were 'various rays' of 'one orient
sun,' and further, that 'no coy ambitious names may here imagine earthly
flames,' because the poet's professional and deliberate homage was
really paid to inward beauty, and never to 'roses of the cheek' alone.
Here we run up against a sweet and famous moral of Carew's, which not
Carew, but Stanley, bears out as the better symbolist of the two. Our
poet does not appear to have contributed towards the religious
literature of a day when the torrent of intense life in human hearts
bred so much heaven-mounting spray, as well as so much necessary scum
and refuse. But his was a temperament so religious that one almost
expects to find somewhere a manuscript volume of 'pious thoughts,' the
shy fruit of Stanley's Christian'retire