solved with the quadrature of the circle, or
the accurate definition of the longitude.
"Nowhere has the record of that date proved
discernible, or even within the reach of
probable conjecture, scrutinising the annals of
the lady Dorothea's life from its commencement
to its termination. It appears, neither
down in the Wealde of Kent, upon the
register at Penshurst, nor yet again upon the
sepulchral monument raised over her dead
lord and herself at Brinton, in Northamptonshire.
As well attempt, now, to denote the
age of Sacharissa, as to be quite certain
(within a century or two) about that of
Cagliostro, or perfectly satisfied, again, in
regard to the real name or the real country
of Psalmanazar. Her years baffle us, not a
jot less bewilderingly than the identity of
that comely White Rose of England, Perkin
Warbeck, or of that ever grimly and ghostly
personage, the Man-in-the-iron-mask! At
any rate, if it be impossible even to guess
when she was born, we know accurately
enough when she was married, when she was
widowed, and when she died. Married—
not, Oh, doleful Muse of Beaconsfield! to
Edmund Waller, poet, legislator, and what
not—but, upon the eleventh of July, sixteen
hundred and thirty-nine, to Henry, Lord
Spencer, subsequently created, by Charles
the First, Earl of Sutherland! Widowed
but four years after her gay bridal morn,
when her husband, in the bloom of his
manhood (being then but twenty-three), was slain
by a cannon-ball while fighting in arms for
his king, like a gallant cavalier as he was, on
the notable twentieth of September, sixteen
hundred and forty-three, in the bloody strife
at Newbury. Surviving her young lord full
forty years, until the eve of her sepulture, on
the twenty-fifth of February, sixteen hundred
and eighty-three, in the stately vault of the
Earls of Sunderland. By Sacharissa the
young cavalier noble, notwithstanding his
premature demise, left three children: one of
them a son, heir to his title and possessions.
And so the story of her proud life is told in
few words: leaving her for forty years in
weeds and for ever afterwards in flowers—
flowers blooming with an eternal fragrance,
the flowers of love and poetry woven deftly
by the hand of Waller into a coronal for
Sacharissa.

The incense of his encomiums he flung to
her with a lavish hand (how affluently!)
from the swinging thurible of his verse.
Remembering her relationship with that Bayard
of Britain, Sir Philip Sidney, author of the
Arcadia, he exclaimed, while gazing upon
the portrait of his mistress, rapt in admiration:

"This glorious piece transcends what he could think,
So much his blood is nobler than his ink!"

Describing her under the leafy covert,
surrounding her ancestral home at Penshurst,
he makes the very branches lacquey her as
she saunters, or cluster above her head in
loving obeisance:

"If she sit down, with tops all towards her bow'd,
They 'round about her into harbours crowd;
Or if she walk, in even ranks they stand,
Like some well-marshalled and obsequious band."

Hearing that some one has infamously
accused her of rougeing: Yes, Heaven! he
cries out in scornful ire:

"Paints her, 'tis true, with the same hand which spreads
Like glorious colours thro' the flowery meads,
When lavish Nature, with, her best attire,
Clothes the gay Spring, the season of desire.
Paints her, 'tis true, and does her cheek adorn
With the same art with which she paints the morn;
With the same art wherewith she gildeth so
Those painted clouds which form Thaumantia's bow."

If he beholds her in his dreams, he thus
apostrophises the lovely vision bearing her
semblance:

"In heaven itself thou sure were't drest
With that angelic-like disguise:
Thus deluded am I blest,
And see my joy with closèd eyes."

Deprecating her evident wrath at his
audacity all the while he is singing, by
reminding her that his passion is, after all,
merely:

"His humble love whose hope shall ne'er rise higher
Than for a pardon that he dares admire."

Chloris, he commands; Zelinda, eulogises;
Amoret, loves; but—he confesses even
while proffering his tenderness to the gentle
nymph last mentioned—he adores Sacharissa.
He suspects it to be for him an idle and
profitless infatuation. Yet he feels, too, at
the same moment, that it is of all his noblest
inspiration. Conscious of this he draws an
exquisite comparison between his own
tantalising pursuit of her, and that of Daphne
by Apollo: proudly predicting his own Fame
(by way of consolation) through an imagery
as beautiful, as it as proved in his and many
another kindred instance, marvellously
prophetic:

"Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,
Tho' unsuccessful, was not sung in vain:
All but the nymph that should redress his wrong,
Attend his passion, and approve his song.
Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought praise,
He catched at love, and fitted his arms with bays."

It is the epitome of the story of Waller's
idolised passion for Sacharissa. A
tenderness in the metrical effusion, of which we
find him occasionally, we had almost said
repeatedly, anticipating some of the loveliest
fancies of various after-poets of yet larger
reputation. Who shall say but that Waller
first suggested to Pope the elfin phantasy of
his Rape of the Lock, through the following