passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not
astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley,
long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But
Drummond's (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. With
admirable judgment it was set up at the very gate of that Golden
Treasury we all know so well; and, therefore, generation after
generation of readers, who have never opened Drummond's poems, know
this fine ode as well as they know any single poem in the whole of
English literature. There was a generation that had not been
taught by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it.
Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called them
beautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they might
some day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry more
complete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that another
stanza might have made a final close; but a master's ode has the
unity of life, and when it ends it ends for ever.

A poem of Drummond's has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has
blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused
her, one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool as
the very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden
increase of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: "For
naught thy cheeks that morn do raise." What sweet, nay, what
solemn roses!

Again:

"Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations overspread her face."