And in one of those ubiquitous Messenger love-poems, first
written in India by Arab poets, and much favoured by
Proveçal, French, and Welsh poets--a poem to the Wind--
we have passion cooling to economy: a typical thing of its
kind. What is metrically interesting, too, it is written in
the fluid trochaic couplets so often associated with these
poems--

"Thou canst with thy powerful blast
Heat apace, and cool as fast;
Thou canst kindle hidden flame,
And again destroy the same. . . ."

Twenty years younger than Carew, William Habington
uses the lutanist note also. But he was of different temper.
In his pattern-poems of Castara, the melody, grown too familiar,
is often tiresome; but change the test and you findeth has
unexpected quality--

"Come then all,
Ye beauties to true beauty's funeral."

Habington Castara was Lucy, daughter of William Herbert,
Lord Powis; and from her Wordsworth probably took the
name for his maiden of the Springs of Dove--

"Like the violet which alone
Prospers in some happy shade,
My Castara lives unknown."

The religious strain heard in some of Habington's later poems
is not unlike George Herbert's, which may have influenced it.
There the imagination flashes out of a sombre mind, as in his
Starlight--

"For the bright firmament
Shoots forth no flame
So silent, but is eloquent
In speaking the Creator's name."

Suckling is a poet who in this gallery of tame pigeons sits
apart, with blood upon his gay feathers. His story moved
on by surprising bounds, by comedy, inordinate wealth,
extravagance, to war, the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition,
and an early death; that gay, irrepressible spirit broken
beyond recovery.

-211-