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harmony and beauty of diction of which he was capable :

"One morning early

This accident encountered me: I heard
The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.

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A sound of music touched my ears, or rather
Indeed entranced my soul. As I stole nearer,
Invited by the melody, I saw

This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
With strains of strange variety and harmony,
Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge
To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds,
That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent.
A nightingale,

Nature's best-skilled musician, undertakes

The challenge, and for every several strain

The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own :
He could not run division with more art

Upon his quaking instrument than she,

The nightingale, did with her various notes
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Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last

Into a pretty anger, that a bird,

Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, or notes,

Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
Had busied many hours to perfect practice :
To end the controversy, in a rapture
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,

So many voluntaries and so quick,

That there was curiosity and cunning,

Concord in discord, lines of differing method
Meeting in one full center of delight.

The bird, ordained to be

Music's first martyr, strove to imitate

These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute,

And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness,

To see the conqueror upon her hearse

To weep a funeral elegy of tears;

He looked upon the trophies of his art,
Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried,
Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge
This cruelty upon the author of it ;

Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
Shall never more betray a harmless peace
To an untimely end :' and in that sorrow,
And as he was pashing it against a tree,
I suddenly stept in."

Though Winstanley states that Ford's plays were profitable to the managers of the theaters where they were produced, it is difficult to believe that he was ever a popular writer. In the garden of his fancy he cultivated too many mournful blossoms, the rue, the night-shade, and the

"Amaranth, flower of Death."

The ways of sorrow he made his own, and the children of grief were his familiars. Where the forest shades of woe were deepest the sound of that delicate instrument, his lute, was natural, plaintive, melancholy, pity-evoking, but in the mirthful sunlight it was too often strained and out of tune. We can but think of Ford's muse as of one sad-eyed and lorn,

"Like Niobe, all tears."

Touching at certain points, now Shakespere, now Marston, now Beaumont and Fletcher, and most resembling the gloom-enshrouded Webster in the bent of his genius, he yet stands apart from them all, an isolated figure, wrapped in the mantle of his darkly contemplative temperament.

Thou cheat'st us, Ford: mak'st one seem two by art :
What is Love's Sacrifice but the Broken Heart?

RICHARD CRASHAW.

PROLOGUE.

OUR scene is Sparta. He whose best of art
Hath drawn this piece calls it THE BROKEN HEART.
The title lends no expectation here
Of apish laughter, or of some lame jeer
At place or persons; no pretended clause
Of jests fit for a brothel court's applause
From vulgar admiration : such low songs,
Tuned to unchaste ears, suit not modest tongues.
The virgin-sisters then deserved fresh bays

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When innocence and sweetness crowned their lays; Then vices gasped for breath, whose whole com

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Was whipped to exile by unblushing verse.

II

This law we keep in our presentment now,

Not to take freedom more than we allow ;

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What may be here thought Fiction, when Time's youth
Wanted some riper years, was known a Truth :
In which, if words have clothed the subject right,
You may partake a pity with delight.

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