he Fairy Queen's court poet. He
claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as her
subjects:

In myrtle arbours on the downs
The Fairy Queen Proserpina,
This night by moonshine leading merry rounds,
Holds a watch with sweet love,
Down the dale, up the hill;
No plaints or groans may move
Their holy vigil.

All you that will hold watch with love,
The Fairy Queen Proserpina
Will make you fairer than Dione's dove;
Roses red, lilies white
And the clear damask hue,
Shall on your cheeks alight:
Love will adorn you.

All you that love, or lov'd before,
The Fairy Queen Proserpina
Bids you increase that loving humour more:
They that have not fed
On delight amorous,
She vows that they shall lead
Apes in Avernus.

It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of
the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does.
There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that can
compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music.

Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation,
was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart were
also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earth
for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least it
transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love nor
the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary;
but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in
music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. His
poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are
the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the
burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath
these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful
feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were
golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,

admiration treads on the heels of worship.

All that I sung still to her praise did tend;
Still she was first, still she my song did end--

in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's
work. Compared with this, that other song beginning:

Follo