A Song for the Zodiack. Let murmuring Lovers no longer repine, But their Hearts and their Voices advance; Let the Nymphs and the Swains in the kind Chorus join, And the Satyrs and Fauns in a Dance. Let Nature put on her Beauty of May, And the Fields and the Meadows adorn; Let the Woods and the Mountains resound with the Joy, And the Echoes their Triumph return.

Ilam is the fit abode of pastoral virtue, and might properly diffuse its shades over Nymphs and Swains.

Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks, Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks Fast as the periods from his fluent quill, Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive, equally affect His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

A mournful muse from Albion swains produce, Sad as the song a gloomy genius chuse, In artful numbers let his wit be shewn, And as he sings of Doron's speak his own; Such be the bard, for only such is fit, To trace pale Doron thro' the fields of wit.

Nor was contemporary art alone the gainer by the movement; it also had its influence on poetry, though this has been obscuredso far as any beneficial influence can be traced at allby the tendency manifested in some of the more amorous poetic swains of the period, who professed to derive their inspiration from the Brotherhood, to identify themselves with what has been styled the "Fleshly School" of verse.

" The metaphoric 'Angel' of enamored swains is at once so trite and obvious, that both the invention and vocabulary of the lover who abides by it so perpetually must have been poor and narrow beyond anything we can conceive of Spenser's fecundity of language and imagery, if we sit down content to imagine that no more is meant by its recurrence than meets the eye.

Her young adorers found their official duties more oppressive than hitherto; her elderly swains had threatenings of gout or rheumatism which prevented their flocking round her as of old at race meeting or polo match.

But I may add, that afterwards, attending dances among the peasants, I was surprised to see my graceful swains in humble life smoking and spitting in the presence of white-robed belles, in a manner not to be witnessed on our farthest western borders.

They had been the life of the sleighing-parties and social gatherings, where the beauty of the budding Jennie attracted as much admiration as did that of her mother a score of years before, but the girl was too young to care for any of the ardent swains who were ready to wrangle for the privilege of a smile or encouraging word.

Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains, In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks, Received the first amid the merry mocks And arch allusions of his fellow swains.

Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments.

"With all the arts of look and dress, She fans the fatal fire; Through pride, mistaken oft for grace, She bids the swains expire.

The sun Behind the mountain's summit slowly sank; Crows came in clouds down from the moorlands dun, And darkened all the pine-trees, rank on rank; The homeward milch-cows at the fountains drank; Swains dropt the sickle, hinds unloosed the car The twin hares sported on the clover-bank,

The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtshipwhere there is any at allis habitually a "simple and speedy affair"not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains.

Yet, O Arcadian swains, Ye best artificers of soothing strains!

We leave our country's bounds, our much-lov'd plains; We from our country fly, unhappy swains!

Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality, freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains.

Clarinda now discovers herself and marries Alcinous, while Castina and her fellow shepherdess Avonia consent to reward their faithful swains, Palaemon and Dorus.

It is a regular masque, for which the familiar story serves as a thread; the goddesses and their symbolical attendants, or else the Graces and the Hours with Hymen and Delight, performing the dances, while a company of rustic swains of Ida, who come to relieve the melancholy of the princely shepherd, form a comic antimasque.

Thus in Brome's Love-Sick Court the swains and nymphs are led in the dance by characters who have sought and found a cure for love among the country folk.

Every writer, I think, who comes within the limits of pastoral as usually understood, has found a certain idealization and a certain refinement necessary in bringing rustic swains into the domain of art.

A-D] swains more meeter.

A pale young man in fashionable attire sat apart, drinking deep and listening with satisfaction to the village swains and their elders' talk; his eye in imagination upon the dark passage in the monastery that hid the trapdoor andno doubt the treasures of the cloister that lay beneath.

The very names of St. John's Day (Ivanje) and the St. John's fires (kries) are said to act like electric sparks on the hearts and minds of these swains, kindling a thousand wild, merry, and happy fancies and ideas in their rustic breasts.

"Lady Carfax always tells the truth," said Nap, beginning to set the chess-board, "which is the exact reason why all her swains adore her.