Page:Points of view (Repplier).djvu/63

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ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS.
51

"But if you, when this you hear,
Fall down murdered through your ear,"

is, by way of compensation, decently interred in the dimpled cheek which has so often been his lurking-place. Lilies and roses and violets exhale their odors around him, a beauteous sheet of lawn is drawn up over his cold little body, and all who see the "perfumed hearse"—presumably the dimple—envy the dead god, blest in his repose. This is as bad in its way as Lovelace's famous lines on "Ellinda's Glove," where that modest article of dress is compelled to represent in turn a snow-white farm with five tenements, whose fair mistress has deserted them, an ermine cabinet too small and delicate for any occupant but its own, and a fiddle-case without its fine-tuned instrument. Dr. Thomas Campion, who, after rhyming delightfully all his life, was pleased to write a treatise against that "vulgar and artificial custom," compares his lady's face, in one musical little song, to a fertile garden, and her lips to ripe cherries, which none may buy or steal because her eyes, like twin angels, have them in keeping, and her brows, like bended bows, defend such treasures from the crowd.