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: 

  Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
  Though thou be black as night,
  And she made all of light,
  Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow—­

seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines.  Others of the songs hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy.  The compliment is certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out—­

  When thou must home to shades of underground,
  And, there arriv’d, a new admired guest,
  The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,
  White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
  To hear the stories of thy finisht love
  From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;