"She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass
Which piped there unto that merry rout;
That jolly shepherd that there piped was
Poor Colin Clout; (who knows not Colin Clout?)
He piped apace while they him danced about;
Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace,
Unto thy love that made thee low to lout;
Thy love is present there with thee in place,
Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace."[319]
Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple
delight as this? It is a sky of Italian April full of sunshine and the
hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us
of that passage in his friend Sidney's _Arcadia_, where the shepherd-boy
pipes "as if he would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical
scene in Dante,[320] of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost
like a bit of real life; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned in
our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. The sound of
that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far away as Thessaly when Apollo
was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great idealizer, had had the
portrait of Beatrice on her easel for years, and every touch of her
pencil transfigured the woman more and more into the glorified saint.
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