Give me, O indulgent Fate, Give me yet, before I die, A sweet, but absolute retreat, ’Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high, That the world may ne’er invade, Through such windings and such shade, My unshaken liberty.

This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still more rarely felt by English ladies at the close of the seventeenth century.  What their real opinion usually was is clothed in crude and ready language by the heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell.  Like Lucia, in the comedy of Epsom Wells, to live out of London was to live in a wilderness, with bears and wolves as one’s companions.  Alone in that age Anne Finch truly loved the country, for its own sake, and had an eye to observe its features.

She had one trouble, constitutional low spirits:  she was a terrible sufferer from what was then known as “The Spleen.”  She wrote a long pindaric Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany in 1701, and was her first introduction to the public.  She talks much about her melancholy in her verses, but, with singular good sense, she recognised that it was physical, and she tried various nostrums.  Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least service: 

In vain to chase thee every art I try, In vain all remedies apply, In vain the Indian leaf infuse, Or the parched eastern berry bruise, Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use.

Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleep from her eyelids at night: 

How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest, To a sad mind, with cares oppress’d?  By what soft means shall I invite Thy powers into my soul to-night?  Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come, Such darkness shall prepare the room As thy own palace overspreads,—­ Thy palace stored with peaceful beds,—­ And Silence, too, shall on thee wait Deep, as in the Turkish State; Whilst, still as death, I will be found, My arms by one another bound, And my dull limbs so clos’d shall be As if already seal’d by thee.

She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but without avail.  When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her.  Only two things could relieve her—­the soothing influence of solitude with nature and the Muses, or the sympathetic presence of her husband.  She disdained the little feminine arts of her age: 

Nor will in fading silks compose Faintly the inimitable rose, Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint 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,