His complement of stores and total war,
O cease then coldly to suspect my love
And let my deed at least my faith approve.
Alas! no youth shall my endearments share
Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care;
No future story shall with truth upbraid
The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid;
Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run
While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down.
View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go:
Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe;
For I attest fair Venus and her son
That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone."

There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora
from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative
value of a book like the "Reliques."

"To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off
from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few
modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric
kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson,
Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the
only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by
William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the
forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of
song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive
melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the
Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His