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why Shirley, writing in the time of the iron-fisted Cromwell; 

 forbids them the garden which should sometime be his and 

 in which so complete will be the poet's retirement tha 

 "though every day he walk around, the sim should seldom, 

 see. ' ' Could anyone expect gay tulips to find a welcome unde: 

 such an austere eye? No, whatever else Shirley may have 

 been, he was at least consistent in patterning his garden to 

 suit the dull brown of the times in which he wrote; and was 

 in his quaint way perfectly obdurate in securing his little 

 sacred plot against such an invasion, decreeing that in his 

 arrangement, \V '*^;AI \fl^^ 



" Those tulips that such wealth display 

 To court my eye, shall lose their name, 

 Though now they listen as if they 

 Expected I should praise their flame 



Not always, it is true, was Shirley of so sad a mien; yet how 

 under the shadow of the great roundheads and within con- 

 stant soimd of the tread of their square toes, could he sing 

 a free and abandoned song to a gay little flirt like the tulip? 

 Now Lovelace, with his IHt and his ring, laboured under no 

 such restraint, nor found it unseemly to sing praise of 

 sprightliness where'er he found it ; in the bird, the smiling 

 sun or in "the rich-robed tulip who clad all in tissu clothes 

 doeth woo." 



Spring is generous, too, with her promises, recording them 

 up in the tree-tops as well as down by the gate. Here swings 

 in the wind a beautiful pink almond, — a modest, small sister! 



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