It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of Ionica is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas.  In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.

There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the glassy surface of this plaintive Dirge: 

  Naiad, hid beneath the bank
    By the willowy river-side,
  Where Narcissus gently sank,
    Where unmarried Echo died,
  Unto thy serene repose
  Waft the stricken Anteros.

  Where the tranquil swan is borne,
    Imaged in a watery glass,
  Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn
    Stoop to catch the boats that pass,
  Where the earliest orchis grows,
  Bury thou fair Anteros.

  On a flickering wave we gaze,
    Not upon his answering eyes: 
  Flower and bird we scarce can praise,
    Having lost his sweet replies: 
  Cold and mute the river flows
  With our tears for Anteros_.

We know well where this place of burial is to be.  Not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for his passage between Eton and Windsor.

The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human existence save that it is so brief.  It gains various expression in words that seem hot on a young man’s lips, and warm on the same lips even when no longer young: 

  I’ll borrow life, and not grow old;
    And nightingales and trees
  Shall keep me, though the veins be cold,
    As young as Sophocles.

And again, in poignant notes: 

  You promise heavens free from strife,
    Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
  But sweet, sweet is this human life,
    So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
  Your chilly stars I can forego,
  This warm, kind world is all I know.

This last quotation is from the poem called Mimnermus in Church.  In this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life.  The author of Ionica seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning.  But Mimnermus is impenitent.  He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive.  He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he clung to them: 

  All beauteous things for which we live
    By laws of time and space decay. 
  But oh! the very reason why
    I clasp them, is because they die.