How often,studying in thy book,have I hummed to myself that of Horace -Laudis amore tumes?Sunt certa piacula quae te Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.
So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows,and pure streams,and the country life.How peaceful,men say,and blessed must have been the life of this old man,how lapped in content,and hedged about by his own humility from the world!
They forget,who speak thus,that thy years,which were many,were also evil,or would have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes.Thou wert poor,but that,to thee,was no sorrow,for greed of money was thy detestation.Thou wert of lowly rank,in an age when gentle blood was alone held in regard;yet thy virtues made thee hosts of friends,and chiefly among religious men,bishops,and doctors of the Church.Thy private life was not unacquainted with sorrow;thy first wife and all her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring,though,in thine age,new love and new offspring comforted thee like "the primrose of the later year."Thy private griefs might have made thee bitter,or melancholy,so might the sorrows of the State and of the Church,which were deprived of their heads by cruel men,despoiled of their wealth,the pious driven,like thee,from their homes;fear everywhere,everywhere robbery and confusion:all this ruin might have angered another temper.But thou,Father,didst bear all with so much sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament,nor a firm faith,nor the love of angling could alone have displayed.For we see many anglers (as witness Richard Franck aforesaid)who are angry men,and myself,when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree,have come nigh to swear prophane.
Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical,no rare thing in the party that professes godliness.But neither private sorrow nor public grief could abate thy natural kindliness,nor shake a religion which was not untried,but had,indeed,passed through the furnace like fine gold.For if we find not Faith at all times easy,because of the oppositions of Science,and the searching curiosity of men's minds,neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day.
For the learned and pious were greatly tossed about,like worthy Mr.
Chillingworth,by doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of England.The humbler folk,also,were invited,now here,now there,by the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists,who gave themselves out to be somebody,while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.Therefore,such a religion as thine was not,so to say,a mere innocence of evil in the things of our Belief,but a reasonable and grounded faith,strong in despite of oppositions.Happy was the man in whom temper,and religion,and the love of the sweet country and an angler's pastime so conveniently combined;happy the long life which held in its hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes!Around thee Church and State might fall in ruins,and might be rebuilded,and thy tears would not be bitter,nor thy triumph cruel.
Thus,by God's blessing,it befell thee Nec turpem senectam Degere,nec cithara carentem.
I would,Father,that I could get at the verity about thy poems.
Those recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr.Donne and others of thy friends,redound more to the praise of thy kind heart than thy fancy.But what or whose was the pastoral poem of "Thealma and Clearchus,"which thou didst set about printing in 1678,and gavest to the world in 1683?Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author's name,and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester,being eighty years of his age,in 1679.Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as "a friend of Edmund Spenser's,"and how could this be?
Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a friend,borrowed by thee out of modesty,and used as a cloak to cover poetry of thine own inditing?When Mr.Flatman writes of Chalkhill,'tis in words well fitted to thine own merit:
Happy old man,whose worth all mankind knows Except himself,who charitably shows The ready road to virtue and to praise,The road to many long and happy days.
However it be,in that road,by quiet streams and through green pastures,thou didst walk all thine almost century of years,and we,who stray into thy path out of the highway of life,we seem to hold thy hand,and listen to thy cheerful voice.If our sport be worse,may our content be equal,and our praise,therefore,none the less.
Father,if Master Stoddard,the great fisher of Tweedside,be with thee,greet him for me,and thank him for those songs of his,and perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear River.
Tweed!winding and wild!where the heart is unbound,They know not,they dream not,who linger around,How the saddened will smile,and the wasted rewin From thee--the bliss withered within.
Or perhaps thou wilt better love,The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,And Manor wi'its mountain rills,An'Etterick,whose waters twine Wi'Yarrow frae the forest hills;An'Gala,too,and Teviot bright,An'mony a stream o'playfu'speed,Their kindred valleys a'unite Amang the braes o'bonnie Tweed!
So,Master,may you sing against each other,you two good old anglers,like Peter and Corydon,that sang in your golden age.
