Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

[Illustration: LUDLOW CASTLE]

The Attendant Spirit in _Comus_ has something of Ariel's gayety, but
his joy is deeper-seated; he serves not the magician Prospero but the
Almighty, and comes gladly to earth in fulfilment of the divine promise,
"He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways."
When his work is done he vanishes, like Ariel, but with a song which shows
the difference between the Elizabethan, or Renaissance, conception of
sensuous beauty (that is, beauty which appeals to the physical senses) and
the Puritan's idea of moral beauty, which appeals to the soul:

Now my task is smoothly done,
I can fly or I can run
Quickly to the green earth's end,
Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend,
And from thence can soar as soon
To the corners of the moon.
Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free:
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

[Sidenote: LYCIDAS]

_Lycidas_ (1637), last of the Horton poems, is an elegy occasioned by