It deserves some critical examination here from three points of view, regarding respectively its general scheme, its minor details of form in metre and language, and lastly, its general poetical characteristics. The first is simple enough in its complexity. The poem is a long _Roman d"Aventure_ (which it is perhaps as well to say, once for all, is not the same as a "Romance of Chivalry," or a "Romance of Adventure"), redeemed from the aimless prolixity incident to that form by its regular plan, by the intercommunion of the adventures of the several knights (none of whom disappears after having achieved his own quest), and by the constant presence of a not too obtrusive allegory. This last characteristic attaches it on the other side to the poems of the _Roman de la Rose_ order, which succeeded the _Romans d"Aventures_ as objects of literary interest and practice, not merely in France, but throughout Europe. This allegory has been variously estimated as a merit or defect of the poem. It is sometimes political, oftener religious, very often moral, and sometimes purely personal--the identifications in this latter case being sometimes clear, as that of Gloriana, Britomart, and Belphoebe with Queen Elizabeth, sometimes probable, as that of Duessa with Queen Mary (not one of Spenser"s most knightly actions), and of Prince Arthur with Leicester, and sometimes more or less problematical, as that of Artegall with Lord Grey, of Timias the Squire with Raleigh, and so forth. To those who are perplexed by these double meanings the best remark is Hazlitt"s blunt one that "the allegory won"t bite them." In other words, it is always perfectly possible to enjoy the poem without troubling oneself about the allegory at all, except in its broad ethical features, which are quite unmistakable. On the other hand, I am inclined to think that the presence of these under-meanings, with the interest which they give to a moderately instructed and intelligent person who, without too desperate a determination to see into millstones, understands "words to the wise," is a great addition to the hold of the poem over the attention, and saves it from the charge of mere desultoriness, which some, at least, of the other greatest poems of the kind (notably its immediate exemplar, the _Orlando Furioso_) must undergo.
And here it may be noted that the charge made by most foreign critics who have busied themselves with Spenser, and perhaps by some of his countrymen, that he is, if not a mere paraphrast, yet little more than a transplanter into English of the Italian, is glaringly uncritical. Not, perhaps, till Ariosto and Ta.s.so have been carefully read in the original, is Spenser"s real greatness understood. He has often, and evidently of purpose, challenged comparison; but in every instance it will be found that his beauties are emphatically his own. He has followed his leaders only as Virgil has followed Homer; and much less slavishly.
It is strange to find English critics of this great if not greatest English poem even nowadays repeating that Spenser borrowed his wonderful stanza from the Italians. He did nothing of the kind. That the _ottava rima_ on the one hand, and the sonnet on the other, may have suggested the idea of it is quite possible. But the Spenserian stanza, as it is justly called, is his own and no one else"s, and its merits, especially that primal merit of adaptation to the subject and style of the poem, are unique. Nothing else could adapt itself so perfectly to the endless series of vignettes and dissolving views which the poet delights in giving; while, at the same time, it has, for so elaborate and apparently integral a form, a singular faculty of hooking itself on to stanzas preceding and following, so as not to interrupt continuous narrative when continuous narrative is needed. Its great compa.s.s, admitting of an almost infinite variety of cadence and composition, saves it from the monotony from which even the consummate art of Milton could not save blank verse now and then, and from which no writer has ever been able to save the couplet, or the quatrain, or the stanzas ending with a couplet, in narratives of very great length. But the most remarkable instance of harmony between metrical form and other characteristics, both of form and matter, in the metrist has yet to be mentioned. It has been said how well the stanza suits Spenser"s pictorial faculty; it certainly suits his musical faculty as well. The slightly (very slightly, for he can be vigorous enough) languid turn of his grace, the voluptuous cadences of his rhythm, find in it the most perfect exponent possible. The verse of great poets, especially Homer"s, has often been compared to the sea. Spenser"s is more like a river, wide, and deep, and strong, but moderating its waves and conveying them all in a steady, soft, irresistible sweep forwards. To aid him, besides this extraordinary instrument of metre, he had forged for himself another in his language. A great deal has been written on this--comments, at least of the unfavourable kind, generally echoing Ben Jonson"s complaint that Spenser "writ no language"; that his dialect is not the dialect of any actual place or time, that it is an artificial "poetic diction" made up of Chaucer, and of Northern dialect, and of cla.s.sicisms, and of foreign words, and of miscellaneous archaisms from no matter where. No doubt it is. But if any other excuse than the fact of a beautiful and satisfactory effect is wanted for the formation of a poetic diction different from the actually spoken or the ordinarily written tongue of the day (and I am not sure that any such excuse is required) it is to be found at once. There was no actually spoken or ordinarily written tongue in Spenser"s day which could claim to be "Queen"s English." Chaucer was obsolete, and since Chaucer there was no single person who could even pretend to authority. Every writer more or less endowed with originality was engaged in beating out for himself, from popular talk, and from cla.s.sical or foreign a.n.a.logy, an instrument of speech. Spenser"s verse language and Lyly"s prose are the most remarkable results of the process; but it was, in fact, not only a common but a necessary one, and in no way to be blamed. As for the other criterion hinted at above, no one is likely to condemn the diction according to that.
In its remoteness without grotesqueness, in its lavish colour, in its abundance of matter for every kind of cadence and sound-effect, it is exactly suited to the subject, the writer, and the verse.
It is this singular and complete adjustment of worker and implement which, with other peculiarities noted or to be noted, gives _The Faerie Queene_ its unique unicity, if such a conceit may be pardoned. From some points of view it might be called a very artificial poem, yet no poem runs with such an entire absence of effort, with such an easy eloquence, with such an effect, as has been said already, of flowing water. With all his learning, and his archaisms, and his cla.s.sicisms, and his Platonisms, and his isms without end, hardly any poet smells of the lamp less disagreeably than Spenser. Where Milton forges and smelts, his gold is native. The endless, various, brightly-coloured, softly and yet distinctly outlined pictures rise and pa.s.s before the eyes and vanish--the multiform, sweetly-linked, softly-sounding harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear--without a break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than the rainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause. And this is the more remarkable because the very last thing that can be said of Spenser is that he is a poet of mere words. Milton himself, the severe Milton, extolled his moral teaching; his philosophical idealism is evidently no mere poet"s plaything or parrot-lesson, but thoroughly thought out and believed in. He is a determined, almost a savage partisan in politics and religion, a steady patriot, something of a statesman, very much indeed of a friend and a lover. And of all this there is ample evidence in his verse.
Yet the alchemy of his poetry has pa.s.sed through the potent alembics of verse and phrase all these rebellious things, and has distilled them into the inimitably fluent and velvet medium which seems to lull some readers to inattention by its very smoothness, and deceive others into a belief in its lack of matter by the very finish and brilliancy of its form. The show pa.s.sages of the poem which are most generally known--the House of Pride, the Cave of Despair, the Entrance of Belphoebe, the Treasury of Mammon, the Gardens of Acrasia, the Sojourn of Britomart in Busirane"s Castle, the Marriage of the Thames and Medway, the Discovery of the False Florimel, Artegall and the Giant, Calidore with Meliboeus, the Processions of the Seasons and the Months--all these are not, as is the case with so many other poets, mere purple patches, diversifying and relieving dullness, but rather remarkable, and as it happens easily separable examples of a power which is shown constantly and almost evenly throughout. Those who admire them do well; but they hardly know Spenser. He, more than almost any other poet, must be read continuously and constantly till the eye and ear and mind have acquired the freedom of his realm of enchantment, and have learnt the secret (as far as a mere reader may learn it) of the poetical spells by which he brings together and controls its wonders. The talk of tediousness, the talk of sameness, the talk of coterie-cultivation in Spenser shows bad taste no doubt; but it rather shows ignorance. The critic has in such cases stayed outside his author; he speaks but of what he has _not_ seen.
The comparative estimate is always the most difficult in literature, and where it can be avoided it is perhaps best to avoid it. But in Spenser"s case this is not possible. He is one of those few who can challenge the t.i.tle of "greatest English poet," and the reader may almost of right demand the opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part I have no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that putting Shakespere aside as _hors concours_, not merely in degree but in kind, only two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Milton and Sh.e.l.ley. The poet of _The Faerie Queene_ is generally inferior to Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from the context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which is no doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, more excursive, less dramatic. As compared with Sh.e.l.ley he lacks not merely the modern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability in which Sh.e.l.ley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancing merits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth, constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as Sh.e.l.ley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, without an aim. But he has more than these merely negative merits. I have seen long accounts of Spenser in which the fact of his invention of the Spenserian stanza is pa.s.sed over almost without a word of comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser"s case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be a.s.signed to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: each poet may have been a Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say that Spenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian stanza--a form only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which is itself practically _adespoton_, and far superior to the sonnet in its capacity of being used in multiples as well as singly. When the unlikelihood of such a complicated measure succeeding in narrative form, the splendid success of it in The _Faerie Queene_, and the remarkable effects which have subsequently been got out of it by men so different as Thomson, Sh.e.l.ley, and Lord Tennyson, are considered, Spenser"s invention must, I think, be counted the most considerable of its kind in literature.
But it may be very freely admitted that this technical merit, great as it is, is the least part of the matter. Whosoever first invented b.u.t.terflies and pyramids in poetry is not greatly commendable, and if Spenser had done nothing but arrange a cunning combination of eight heroics, with interwoven rhymes and an Alexandrine to finish with, it may be acknowledged at once that his claims to primacy would have to be dismissed at once. It is not so. Independently of _The Faerie Queene_ altogether he has done work which we must go to Milton and Sh.e.l.ley themselves to equal. The varied and singularly original strains of _The Calendar_, the warmth and delicacy combined of the _Epithalamion_, the tone of mingled regret and wonder (not inferior in its characteristic Renaissance ring to Du Bellay"s own) of _The Ruins of Rome_, the different notes of the different minor poems, are all things not to be found in any minor poet. But as does not always happen, and as is perhaps not the case with Milton, Spenser"s greatest work is also his best. In the opinion of some at any rate the poet of _Lycidas_, of _Comus_, of _Samson Agonistes_, even of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, ranks as high as, if not above, the poet of _Paradise Lost_. But the poet of _The Faerie Queene_ could spare all his minor works and lose only, as has been said, quant.i.ty not quality of greatness. It is hardly necessary at this time of day to repeat the demonstration that Macaulay in his famous jibe only succeeded in showing that he had never read what he jibed at; and though other decriers of Spenser"s masterpiece may not have laid themselves open to quite so crushing a retort, they seldom fail to show a somewhat similar ignorance. For the lover of poetry, for the reader who understands and can receive the poetic charm, the revelation of beauty in metrical language, no English poem is the superior, or, range and variety being considered, the equal of _The Faerie Queene_. Take it up where you will, and provided only sufficient time (the reading of a dozen stanzas ought to suffice to any one who has the necessary gifts of appreciation) be given to allow the soft dreamy versicoloured atmosphere to rise round the reader, the languid and yet never monotonous music to gain his ear, the mood of mixed imagination and heroism, adventure and morality, to impress itself on his mind, and the result is certain. To the influence of no poet are the famous lines of Spenser"s great nineteenth-century rival so applicable as to Spenser"s own. The enchanted boat, angel-guided, floating on away, afar, without conscious purpose, but simply obeying the instinct of sweet poetry, is not an extravagant symbol for the mind of a reader of Spenser. If such readers want "Criticisms of Life" first of all, they must go elsewhere, though they will find them amply given, subject to the limitations of the poetical method. If they want story they may complain of slackness and deviations. If they want glorifications of science and such like things, they had better shut the book at once, and read no more on that day nor on any other. But if they want poetry--if they want to be translated from a world which is not one of beauty only into one where the very uglinesses are beautiful, into a world of perfect harmony in colour and sound, of an endless sequence of engaging event and character, of n.o.ble pa.s.sions and actions not lacking their due contrast, then let them go to Spenser with a certainty of satisfaction. He is not, as are some poets, the poet of a certain time of life to the exclusion of others. He may be read in childhood chiefly for his adventure, in later youth for his display of voluptuous beauty, in manhood for his ethical and historical weight, in age for all combined, and for the contrast which his bright universe of invention affords with the work-day jejuneness of this troublesome world.
But he never palls upon those who have once learnt to taste him; and no poet is so little of an acquired taste to those who have any liking for poetry at all. He has been called the poet"s poet--a phrase honourable but a little misleading, inasmuch as it first suggests that he is not the poet of the great majority of readers who cannot pretend to be poets themselves, and secondly insinuates a kind of intellectual and aesthetic Pharisaism in those who do admire him, which may be justly resented by those who do not.
Let us rather say that he is the poet of all others for those who seek in poetry only poetical qualities, and we shall say not only what is more than enough to establish his greatness but what, as I for one believe, can be maintained in the teeth of all gainsayers.[23]
[23] Of Spenser as of two other poets in this volume, Shakespere and Milton, it seemed to be unnecessary and even impertinent to give any extracts. Their works are, or ought to be, in all hands; and even if it were not so, no s.p.a.ce at my command could give sample of their infinite varieties.
The volume, variety, and vigour of the poetical production of the period in which Spenser is the central figure--the last twenty years of the sixteenth century--is perhaps proportionally the greatest, and may be said to be emphatically the most distinguished in purely poetical characteristics of any period in our history. Every kind of poetical work is represented in it, and every kind (with the possible exception of the semi-poetical kind of satire) is well represented. There is, indeed, no second name that approaches Spenser"s, either in respect of importance or in respect of uniform excellence of work. But in the most incomplete production of this time there is almost always that poetical spark which is often entirely wanting in the finished and complete work of other periods. I shall, therefore, divide the whole ma.s.s into four groups, each with certain distinguished names at its head, and a crowd of hardly undistinguished names in its rank and file. These four groups are the sonneteers, the historians, the satirists, and lastly, the miscellaneous lyrists and poetical miscellanists.
Although it is only recently that its ma.s.s and its beauty have been fully recognised, the extraordinary outburst of sonnet-writing at a certain period of Elizabeth"s reign has always attracted the attention of literary historians. For many years after Wyatt and Surrey"s work appeared the form attracted but little imitation or practice. About 1580 Spenser himself probably, Sidney and Thomas Watson certainly, devoted much attention to it; but it was some dozen years later that the most striking crop of sonnets appeared. Between 1593 and 1596 there were published more than a dozen collections, chiefly or wholly of sonnets, and almost all bearing the name of a single person, in whose honour they were supposed to be composed. So singular is this coincidence, showing either an intense _engouement_ in literary society, or a spontaneous determination of energy in individuals, that the list with dates is worth giving. It runs thus:--In 1593 came Barnes"s _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Fletcher"s _Licia_, and Lodge"s _Phillis_. In 1594 followed Constable"s _Diana_, Daniel"s _Delia_,[24] the anonymous _Zepheria_, Drayton"s _Idea_, Percy"s _Coelia_, and Willoughby"s _Avisa_; 1595 added the _Alcilia_ of a certain J. C., and Spenser"s perfect _Amoretti_; 1596 gave Griffin"s _Fidessa_, Lynch"s _Diella_, and Smith"s _Chloris_, while Shakespere"s earliest sonnets were probably not much later. Then the fashion changed, or the vein was worked out, or (more fancifully) the impossibility of equalling Spenser and Shakespere choked off compet.i.tors. The date of Lord Brooke"s singular _Coelica_, not published till long afterwards, is uncertain; but he may, probably, be cla.s.sed with Sidney and Watson in period.
[24] _Delia_ had appeared earlier in 1592, and partially in 1591; but the text of 1594 is the definitive one. Several of these dates are doubtful or disputed.
Fulke, or, as he himself spelt it, Foulke Greville, in his later years Lord Brooke,[25] was of a n.o.ble house in Warwickshire connected with the Beauchamps and the Willoughbys. He was born in 1554, was educated at Shrewsbury with Philip Sidney, whose kinsman, lifelong friend, and first biographer he was--proceeded, not like Sidney to Oxford, but to Cambridge (where he was a member, it would seem, of Jesus College, not as usually said of Trinity)--received early lucrative preferments chiefly in connection with the government of Wales, was a favourite courtier of Elizabeth"s during all her later life, and, obtaining a royal gift of Warwick Castle, became the ancestor of the present earls of Warwick. In 1614 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Brooke, who lived to a considerable age, was stabbed in a rather mysterious manner in 1628 by a servant named Haywood, who is said to have been enraged by discovering that his master had left him nothing in his will. The story is, as has been said, mysterious, and the affair seems to have been hushed up. Lord Brooke was not universally popular, and a very savage contemporary epitaph on him has been preserved. But he had been the patron of the youthful Davenant, and has left not a little curious literary work, which has only been recently collected, and little of which saw the light in his own lifetime.
Of his two singular plays, _Mustapha_ and _Alaham_ (closet-dramas having something in common with the Senecan model), _Mustapha_ was printed in 1609; but it would seem piratically. His chief prose work, the _Life of Sidney_, was not printed till 1652. His chief work in verse, the singular _Poems of Monarchy_ (ethical and political treatises), did not appear till eighteen years later, as well as the allied _Treatise on Religion_. But poems or tracts on human learning, on wars, and other things, together with his tragedies as above, had appeared in 1633. This publication, a folio volume, also contained by far the most interesting part of his work, the so-called sonnet collection of Coelica--a medley, like many of those mentioned in this chapter, of lyrics and short poems of all lengths and metrical arrangements, but, unlike almost all of them, dealing with many subjects, and apparently addressed to more than one person. It is here, and in parts of the prose, that the reader who has not a very great love for Elizabethan literature and some experience of it, can be recommended to seek confirmation of the estimate in which Greville was held by Charles Lamb, and of the very excusable and pious, though perhaps excessive, admiration of his editor Dr. Grosart. Even _Coelica_ is very unlikely to find readers as a whole, owing to the strangely repellent character of Brooke"s thought, which is intricate and obscure, and of his style, which is at any rate sometimes as harsh and eccentric as the theories of poetry which made him compose verse-treatises on politics. Nevertheless there is much n.o.bility of thought and expression in him, and not unfrequent flashes of real poetry, while his very faults are characteristic. He may be represented here by a piece from _Coelica_, in which he is at his very best, and most poetical because most simple--
[25] He is a little liable to be confounded with two writers (brothers of a patronymic the same as his t.i.tle) Samuel and Christopher Brooke, the latter of whom wrote poems of some merit, which Dr. Grosart has edited.
"I, with whose colours Myra dressed her head, I, that ware posies of her own hand making, I, that mine own name in the chimnies read By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking: Must I look on, in hope time coming may With change bring back my turn again to play?
"I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found A garland sweet with true love knots in flowers, Which I to wear about mine arms, was bound That each of us might know that all was ours: Must I lead now an idle life in wishes, And follow Cupid for his loaves and fishes?
"I, that did wear the ring her mother left, I, for whose love she gloried to be blamed, I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft, I, who did make her blush when I was named: Must I lose ring, flowers, blush, theft, and go naked, Watching with sighs till dead love be awaked?
"I, that when drowsy Argus fell asleep, Like jealousy o"erwatched with desire, Was ever warned modesty to keep While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature"s fire: Must I look on a-cold while others warm them?
Do Vulcan"s brothers in such fine nets arm them?
"Was it for this that I might Myra see _Washing the water with her beauties white_?
Yet would she never write her love to me: Thinks wit of change when thoughts are in delight?
Mad girls may safely love as they may leave; No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive."
Had Brooke always written with this force and directness he would have been a great poet. As it is, he has but the ore of poetry, not the smelted metal.
For there is no doubt that Sidney here holds the primacy, not merely in time but in value, of the whole school, putting Spenser and Shakespere aside. That thirty or forty years" diligent study of Italian models had much to do with the extraordinary advance visible in his sonnets over those of Tottel"s _Miscellany_ is, no doubt, undeniable. But many causes besides the inexplicable residuum of fortunate inspiration, which eludes the most careful search into literary cause and effect, had to do with the production of the "lofty, insolent, and pa.s.sionate vein," which becomes noticeable in English poetry for the first time about 1580, and which dominates it, if we include the late autumn-summer of Milton"s last productions, for a hundred years. Perhaps it is not too much to say that this makes its very first appearance in Sidney"s verse, for _The Shepherd"s Calendar_, though of an even more perfect, is of a milder strain. The inevitable tendency of criticism to gossip about poets instead of criticising poetry has usually mixed a great deal of personal matter with the accounts of _Astrophel and Stella_, the series of sonnets which is Sidney"s greatest literary work, and which was first published some years after his death in an incorrect and probably pirated edition by Thomas Nash. There is no doubt that there was a real affection between Sidney (Astrophel) and Penelope Devereux (Stella), daughter of the Earl of Ess.e.x, afterwards Lady Rich, and that marriage proving unhappy, Lady Mountjoy. But the attempts which have been made to identify every hint and allusion in the series with some fact or date, though falling short of the unimaginable folly of scholastic labour-lost which has been expended on the sonnets of Shakespere, still must appear somewhat idle to those who know the usual genesis of love-poetry--how that it is of imagination all compact, and that actual occurrences are much oftener occasions and bases than causes and material of it. It is of the smallest possible importance or interest to a rational man to discover what was the occasion of Sidney"s writing these charming poems--the important point is their charm. And in this respect (giving heed to his date and his opportunities of imitation) I should put Sidney third to Shakespere and Spenser. The very first piece of the series, an oddly compounded sonnet of thirteen Alexandrines and a final heroic, strikes the note of intense and fresh poetry which is only heard afar off in Surrey and Wyatt, which is hopelessly to seek in the tentatives of Turberville and Googe, and which is smothered with jejune and merely literary ornament in the less formless work of Sidney"s contemporary, Thomas Watson. The second line--
"That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,"
the couplet--
"Oft turning others" leaves to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain,"
and the sudden and splendid finale--
""Fool!" said my muse, "look in thy heart and write!""
are things that may be looked for in vain earlier.
A little later we meet with that towering soar of verse which is also peculiar to the period:
"When Nature made her chief work--Stella"s eyes, In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?"--
lines which those who deprecate insistence on the importance of form in poetry might study with advantage, for the thought is a mere commonplace conceit, and the beauty of the phrase is purely derived from the cunning arrangement and cadence of the verse. The first perfectly charming sonnet in the English language--a sonnet which holds its own after three centuries of compet.i.tion--is the famous "With how sad steps, O moon, thou climbst the skies," where Lamb"s stricture on the last line as obscure seems to me unreasonable. The equally famous phrase, "That sweet enemy France," which occurs a little further on is another, and whether borrowed from Giordano Bruno or not is perhaps the best example of the felicity of expression in which Sidney is surpa.s.sed by few Englishmen. Nor ought the extraordinary variety of the treatment to be missed. Often as Sidney girds at those who, like Watson, "dug their sonnets out of books," he can write in the learned literary manner with the best. The pleasant ease of his sonnet to the sparrow, "Good brother Philip," contrasts in the oddest way with his allegorical and mythological sonnets, in each of which veins he indulges hardly less often, though very much more wisely than any of his contemporaries. Nor do the other "Songs of variable verse," which follow, and in some editions are mixed up with the sonnets, display less extraordinary power. The first song, with its refrain in the penultimate line of each stanza,
"To you, to you, all song of praise is due,"
contrasts in its throbbing and burning life with the faint and misty imagery, the stiff and wooden structure, of most of the verse of Sidney"s predecessors, and deserves to be given in full:--
"Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth; Which now my breast o"ercharged to music lendeth?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only in you my song begins and endeth.
"Who hath the eyes which marry state with pleasure, Who keeps the keys of Nature"s chiefest treasure?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only for you the heaven forgat all measure.
"Who hath the lips, where wit in fairness reigneth?
Who womankind at once both decks and staineth?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only by you Cupid his crown maintaineth.
"Who hath the feet, whose steps all sweetness planteth?
Who else; for whom Fame worthy trumpets wanteth?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only to you her sceptre Venus granteth.
"Who hath the breast, whose milk doth pa.s.sions nourish?
Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth cherish?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only through you the tree of life doth flourish.
"Who hath the hand, which without stroke subdueth?
Who long dead beauty with increase reneweth?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only at you all envy hopeless rueth.
"Who hath the hair, which loosest fastest tieth?
Who makes a man live then glad when he dieth?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only of you the flatterer never lieth.
"Who hath the voice, which soul from senses sunders?
Whose force but yours the bolts of beauty thunders?
To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only with you not miracles are wonders.
"Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth?
Which now my breast o"ercharged to music lendeth?