nt on glass
The Sovereign's blurr'd and indistinguished face,
The threatening angel and the speaking ass_.

But she will wander at sundown through the exquisite woods of
Eastwell, and will watch the owlets in their downy nest or
the nightingale silhouetted against the fading sky. Then her
constitutional depression passes, and she is able once more to be
happy:

_Our sighs are then but vernal air,
But April-drops our tears_,

as she says in delicious numbers that might be Wordsworth's own. In
these delightful moments, released from the burden of her tyrant
malady, her eyes seem to have been touched with the herb euphrasy,
and she has the gift, denied to the rest of her generation, of seeing
nature and describing what she sees. In these moods, this contemporary
of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of country
life as the following:

_When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads,
Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud:
When curlews cry beneath the village-walls,
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls_.

In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she was
particularly partial, and to this she commonly turned her footsteps.

Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to reverie, she could
be gay enough upon occasion, and her sprightly poems have a genuine
sparkle. Here is an anacreontic--written "for my brother Leslie
Finch"--which has never before been printed:

_From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall, come away
To the Punch-bowl by far more inviting;
To the fops and 'the beaux
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here what is truly delighting.

The half globe 'tis in figure,
And would it were bigger,
Yet here's the whole universe floating;
Here's titles and places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doting.

'Twas a world like to this
The hot Grecian did miss,
Of whom histories keep such a pother;
To the bottom he sunk,
And when he had drunk,
Grew maudlin, and wept for another_.

At another point, Anne Finch bore very little likeness to her
noisy sisterhood of fashion. In an age when it was the height of
ill-breeding for a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardelia
was not