The height of honour in the kindly badge of shame! Who hath the crimson weeds stolne from my morning skies § 1 As he says, his "life melts with too much thinking." Exhausted by ecstasy, he pauses; then he flies from thought to thought, seeking relief for his wound, like the Satyr whom he describes :

"Prometheus, when first from heaven hie

He brought downe fire, ere then on earth not seene,
Fond of delight, a Satyr standing by

Gave it a kisse, as it like sweet had beene.

"Feeling forthwith the other burning power,

Wood with the smart with showts and shryking shrill,
He sought his ease in river, field, and bower,
But for the time his griefe went with him still." 2

At last calm returned; and whilst this calm lasts, the lively, glowing spirit plays like a flickering flame on the surface of the deep brooding fire. His love-songs and word-portraits, delightful pagan and chivalric fancies, seem to be inspired by Petrarch or Plato. We feel the charm and sportiveness under the seeming affectation:

"Faire eyes, sweete lips, deare heart, that foolish I
Could hope by Cupids helpe on you to pray;
Since to himselfe he doth your gifts apply,

As his maine force, choise sport, and easefull stray.

"For when he will see who dare him gainsay,
Then with those eyes he lookes, lo by and by
Each soule doth at Loves feet his weapons lay,

Glad if for her he give them leave to die.

1 Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 102, p. 614.

Ibid. p. 525: this sonnet is headed E. D. Wood, in his Athen. Oxon. i., says it was written by Sir Edward Dyer, Chancellor of the Most noble Order of the Garter.-TR.

"When he will play, then in her lips he is,

Where blushing red, that Loves selfe them doth love,

With either lip he doth the other kisse:

But when he will for quiets sake remove

From all the world, her heart is then his rome,
Where well he knowes, no man to him can come."

Both heart and sense are captive here. If he finds the
eyes of Stella more beautiful than anything in the world,
he finds her soul more lovely than her body. He is a
Platonist when he recounts how Virtue, wishing to be
loved of men, took Stella's form to enchant their eyes,
and make them see the heaven which the inner sense
reveals to heroic souls. We recognise in him that
entire submission of heart, love turned into a religion,
perfect passion which asks only to grow, and which, like
the piety of the mystics, finds itself always too insignifi-
cant when it compares itself with the object loved :
"My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,
My wit doth strive those passions to defend,
Which for reward spoyle it with vaine annoyes,
I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend :

I see and yet no greater sorrow take,

Than that I lose no more for Stella's sake." 2

At last, like Socrates in the banquet, he turns his eyes to deathless beauty, heavenly brightness:

"Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,

And thou my minde aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.

O take fast hold, let that light be thy guide,

In this small course which birth drawes out to death." 8

1 Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 43, p. 545.

Ibid. sonnet 18, p. 573.

Last sonnet, p. 539.

Divine love continues the earthly love; he was imprisoned in this, and frees himself. By this nobility, these lofty aspirations, recognise one of those serious souls of which there are so many in the same climate and race. Spiritual instincts pierce through the dominant paganism, and ere they make Christians, make Platonists.

V.

Sidney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him, a multitude of poets. In fiftytwo years, without counting the drama, two hundred and thirty-three are enumerated,1 of whom forty have genius or talent: Breton, Donne, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, the two Fletchers, Beaumont, Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Wither, Warner, Davison, Carew, Suckling, Herrick ;—we should grow tired in counting them. There is a crop of them, and so there is at the same time in Catholic and heroic Spain; and as in Spain it was a sign of the times, the mark of a public want, the index to an extraordinary and transient condition of the mind. What is this condition which gives rise to so universal a taste for poetry? What is it breathes life into their books? How happens it, that amongst the least, in spite of pedantries, awkwardnesses, in the rhyming chronicles or descriptive cyclopedias, we meet with brilliant pictures and genuine love-cries? How happens it, that when this generation was exhausted, true poetry ended in England, as true painting in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind came and passed away,-that, namely, of instinctive and

1 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, i. Part 2, ch. 2, 3, 4. Among these 233 poets the authors of isolated pieces are not reckoned, but only those who published or collected their works.

creative conception. These men had new senses, and no theories in their heads. Thus, when they took a walk, their emotions were not the same as ours. What is sunrise to an ordinary man? A white smudge on the edge of the sky, between bosses of clouds, amid pieces of land, and bits of road, which he does not see because he has seen them a hundred times. But for them, all things have a soul; I mean that they feel within themselves, indirectly, the uprising and severance of the outlines, the power and contrast of tints, the sad or delicious sentiment, which breathes from this combination and union like a harmony or a cry. How sorrowful is the sun, as he rises in 3 inist above the sad sea-furrows; what an air of resignation in the old trees rustling in the night rain; what a feverish tumult in the mass of waves, whose dishevelled locks are twisted for ever on the surface of the abyss! But the great torch of heaven, the luminous god, emerges and shines; the tall, soft, pliant herbs, the evergreen meadows, the expanding roof of lofty oaks,the whole English landscape, continually renewed and illumined by the flooding moisture, diffuses an inexhaustible freshness. These meadows, red and white with flowers, ever moist and ever young, slip off their veil of golden mist, and appear suddenly, timidly, like beautiful virgins. Here is the cuckoo-flower, which springs up before the coming of the swallow; there the hare-bell, blue as the veins of a woman; the marigold, which sets with the sun, and, weeping, rises with him. Drayton, in his Polyolbion, sings

"Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glittring East Guilds every lofty top, which late the humorous Night Bespangled had with pearle, to please the Mornings sight;

On which the mirthfull Quires, with their cleere open throats, Unto the joyfull Morne so straine their warbling notes, That Hills and Valleys ring, and even the ecchoing Ayre Seemes all compos'd of sounds, about them everywhere. Thus sing away the Morne, untill the mounting Sunne, Through thick exhaled fogs, his golden head hath runne, And through the twisted tops of our close Covert creeps, To kiss the gentle Shade, this while that sweetly sleeps." A step further, and you will find the old gods reappear. They reappear, these living gods-these living gods mingled with things which you cannot help meeting as soon as you meet nature again. Shakspeare, in the Tempest, sings:

66

Ceres, most bounteous lady thy rich leas

Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep;
Thy banks with peonèd and lilied brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns
Hail, many-colour'd messenger (Iris.) .
Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers,
And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown
My bosky acres and my unshrubb'd down." 2

In Cymbeline he says:

"They are as gentle as zephyrs, blowing below the violet, Not wagging his sweet head." 8

Greene writes:

"When Flora, proud in pomp of all her flowers,
Sat bright and gay,

1 M. Drayton's Polyvlbion, ed. 1622, 13th song, p. 214.