were addressed, whether they represent a constant passion or a succession of passing impressions, or whether they were not for the most part studies of love, or exercises of a poetical gallantry. The internal evidence supports this latter view; and if the poems are read without any bondage of a personal kind, each by the light of its own beauty alone, I suspect we shall arrive at the true enjoyment of them after all. To suppose that they were all dedicated to Geraldine, is out of the question. Some of them have clearly a different application, and one or two of them, at least, are distinct in their reference to his wife. When Surrey is said to have fallen in love with Geraldine, she was only thirteen years old; when he died, she was hardly nineteen. There is reason to believe that his conduct as a husband was irreproachable; and, perhaps, the most probable inference that can be gathered from the story of his passion, as revealed to us in his poems, is, hat Geraldine was one of those mistresses who reach the heart through the imagination, and supply poets with an inspiration, without very seriously endangering their affections. The character of Surrey's poetry appears to justify this conclusion. There is very little impulse in it. What he did, he did with premeditation, although with less formality, because he was of a more ardent nature, than his friend Wyatt. There are many careless passages which seem to have waited for that correction which he could never find leisure in his short and flurried life to bestow upon them; but the general character is that of deliberation and finish. This is evident in his exact choice of words, and in the regularity of his versification. His language is often happy, and never superfluous. There is a studious air in his lines which takes off something from the fresh flavour of the thought, presenting it rather in its prepared than in its natural form. Hence we have much sweetness, and even tenderness; but no spontaneous bursts of passion forcing their way through the restraints of art. He is amongst the earliest of our love

1 See Poems, p. 58, 64.

poets, and will always be read with interest for the sake of his purity and refinement; but he is inferior in earnestness and depth of emotion to some who succeeded him, especially the poets of the age of Elizabeth.

The text of this edition has been carefully revised and collated with preceding editions; the variances between them and the manuscripts referred to by Dr. Nott have been compared, that which seemed to be the best reading being in al cases adopted; and the original order and headings of the poems, as they were first published, have been restored.

WITH SUIT TO HIS LADY, TO RUE ON HIS DYING HEART.1

THE

HE sun hath twice brought forth his tender green,
Twice clad the earth in lively lustiness;

Once have the winds the trees despoiled clean,
And once again begins their cruelness;

Since I have hid under my breast the harm
That never shall recover healthfulness.

1 This is the first piece in all the editions, and the only one Dr. Nott has retained in its original place. Its priority in the collection affords slender support to Dr. Nott's assertion, that it was Surrey's first poem on Geraldine; unless we are to suppose that these pieces were arranged chronologically, which internal evidence shows to be improbable, and which Dr. Nott himself did not believe, or he would not have ventured to disturb the order in which he found them. The conjecture that it was written in 1541, some nine years after Surrey was contracted to Lady Frances Vere, and at least six years after his marriage was publicly solemnized, is irreconcilable with the supposition that it was his first poem on Geraldine, or that it was one of his earliest compositions. He certainly began to write before that time, and as he tells us in the opening lines that he had been suffering for nearly two years from the passion he here describes, we may reasonably assume that this could not have been the first occasion on which he gave utterance to his feelings. Whether the passion was real or feigned is nothing to the purpose. A man who was contracted in marriage at sixteen, and who was only twenty years of age when his eldest son was born, must have discovered his poetical sensibility before he was four or five and twenty. According to Dr. Nott's theory, however, all Surrey's love poems were SURREY,

4

The winter's hurt recovers with the warm ;1
The parched green restored is with shade;
What warmth, alas! may serve for to disarm
The frozen heart, that mine in flame" hath made?
What cold again is able to restore

My fresh green years, that wither thus and fade?
Alas! I see nothing hath hurt so sore

3

But Time, in time, reduceth a return:
In time my hurt increaseth more and more,*
And seems to have my cure always in scorn.
Strange kinds of death in life that I do try!
At hand, to melt; far off in flame to burn.
And like as time list to my cure apply,
So doth each place my comfort clean refuse.
All thing alive, that seeth the heavens with eye,
With cloak of night may cover, and excuse
Itself from travail of the day's unrest,
Save I, alas! against all others use,

That then stir up the torments of my breast;
And curse each star as causer of my fate.

written between that age and the year 1545, when he sought the command at Bologne to escape from the fascination of his vain and cruel mistress-a speculation discredited alike by the circumstances of his life and the very nature of the poems themselves. In Dr. Nott's edition, this piece is printed with indented couplets, after the manner of the Italian Terza Rima, a form seldom adopted in English poetry. It is here restored to the shape in which it originally appeared.

1 The indiscriminate use of substantives and adjectives was common amongst the poets antecedent to Surrey; and instances of it may be found much later.

2 Dr. Nott writes this in one word 'inflame' as an abbreviated participle. He takes this reading from Mr. Hill's MS. and the octavo editions. The quartos read in flame,' which agrees better with the structure of the line.

3 Thus in all the editions, except Dr. Nott's, where the line runs'But Time some time reduceth,' &c., adopted from Mr. Hill's MS. The original expression is simpler. Dr. Nott rejects it as a play upon words.

4 Dr. Nott has Yet Time my hurt encreaseth,' &c.

There is no

authority for yet,' although it certainly helps the sense. Hurt' is found in only two editions, and is here adopted because it carries on the subject of the preceding lines. In all the other editions it is harm,' which is also justifiable as recalling the opening passage.

2

And when the sun hath eke the dark' opprest,
And brought the day, it doth nothing abate
The travails of mine endless smart and pain.
For then, as one that hath the light in hate,'
I wish for night, more covertly to plain;
And me withdraw from every haunted place,
Lest by my chere3 my chance appear too plain.
And in my mind I measure pace by pace,
To seek the place where I myself had lost,
That day that I was tangled in the lace,*
In seeming slack, that knitteth ever most.
But never yet the travail of my thought,
Of better state, could catch a cause to boast.
For if I found, some time that I have sought,
Those stars by whom I trusted of the port,
My sails do fall, and I advance right nought;
As anchored fast my spirits do all resort
To stand agazed, and sink in more and more
The deadly harm which she doth take in sport.
Lo! if I seek, how do I find my sore!
And if I flee, I carry with me still

5

The venomed shaft, which doth his force restore
By haste of flight; and I may plain my fill
Unto myself, unless this careful song

Print in your heart some parcel of my tene.

1 Another instance of the adjective substituted for the substantivedark for darkness.

2 Dr. Nott traces this expression to Petrarch:

'Se non se aliquanti c'hanno in odio il Sole.'

3 Countenance-behaviour.

Surrey's time.

The word became obsolete soon after

4 Sometimes las (from the Norman)—a snare: in its ordinary sense -lace; from whence the verb to lace, to beat, striping the flesh with lashes to lace the jacket. The phrase is still a provincialism.

5. To stand at gaze and suck in,' &c., is Dr. Nott's reading from the Harrington and Hill MSS.

6 Part or portion.

7 Used in a variety of senses by the old writers-grief, anger, loss, &c. Here it means grief. Dr. Nott reads 'will' from the MSS. He thinks tene, a corruption, and that 'will' is required by the Terza Rima to rhyme with 'till.' All the other editions read tene.