Though th' error of my youth in them appear
Suffice they show I lived and loved thee dear."

Daniel's genius is best shown in the expression of bereaved love in the "Complaint of Rosamond," and in "Hymen's Triumph "-as Spenser said, "in tragic plaints and passionate mischance." In the expression of courtship love, his imagination is cold and acts artificially and mechanically but when the beloved object is taken away, he is moved to the depths, and pours forth his strains with genuine warmth. The passion has still a certain softness in it his lovers have not the inconsolable fierce distraction of Shakespeare's forsaken lover, "tearing of papers, breaking rings atwain :" they do not shriek undistinguished woe: but they sigh deeply, and their voices are richly laden with impassioned remembrance. The plaintive sorrow of Thyrsis is sweet and profound. But nothing that Daniel has written flows with surer instinct and more natural impulse than the agonised endearments of Harry over the body of Rosamond. Wholly different in character from the frantic doting of Venus over her lost Adon, these verses are hardly less perfect as the utterance of a milder and less fiercely fond passion. The deep heart's sorrow of the bereaved lover makes itself felt in every line

"Then as these passions do him overwhelm
He draws him near my body to behold it;
And as the vine married unto the elm
With strict embraces, so doth he enfold it:
And as he in his careful arms doth hold it
Viewing the face that even death commends,
On senseless lips millions of kisses spends.

'Pitiful mouth,' said he, 'that living gavest
The sweetest comfort that my soul could wish :
O be it lawful now, that dead thou havest,
This sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss.
And you, fair eyes, containers of my bliss,
Motives of love, born to be matched never,
Entomb'd in your sweet circles, sleep for ever.

'Ah, how methinks I see Death dallying seeks
To entertain itself in Love's sweet place!
Decayed roses of discoloured cheeks,

Do yet retain dear notes of former grace,
And ugly Death sits fair within her face;
Sweet remnants resting of vermilion red,
That Death itself doubts whether she be dead.

'Wonder of beauty, O receive these plaints,
These obsequies, the last that I shall make thee:
For lo, my soul that now already faints,

(That loved thee living, dead will not forsake thee)
Hastens her speedy course to overtake thee.
I'll meet my death, and free myself thereby,
For ah, what can he do that cannot die?

'Yet, ere I die, thus much my soul doth vow,
Revenge shall sweeten death with ease of mind:
And I will cause posterity shall know,
How fair thou wert above all woman kind.

And after-ages monuments shall find

Showing thy beauty's title, not thy name,

Rose of the world that sweetened so the same.'"

III.-HENRY CONSTABLE (1555 ?-1610?)

Constable was of Roman Catholic family, and was educated at St John's, Cambridge, where he took the degree of B.A. in 1579. He was obliged to leave England in 1595, from suspicion of treasonable practices. Venturing back in 1601 or 1602, he was committed to the Tower, from which he was not released till towards the close of 1604. He is mentioned as if he were still alive in the 'Return from Parnassus' (1606), and in Bolton's Hypercritica' (1616) as if he were then dead. The first edition of his sonnets to "Diana" appeared in 1592, and contained 23; a second was issued in 1594, containing 27. Sixty-three sonnets by Constable, methodically arranged in sevens, are printed in the Harleian Miscellany from a MS. known as Todd's MS. this collection comprises all that appear in the

printed collections. Constable wrote also certain 'Spiritual Sonnets,' and a version of the tale of Venus and Adonis, which was not published till 1600, but is believed to have been written earlier.

Like Daniel, Constable does not attempt the delineation of stormy passions, yet his deepest vein is quite different from Daniel's. He has a more ardent soul than Daniel : his imagination is more warmly and richly coloured: he has more of flame and less of moisture in him. Daniel's words flow most abundantly and with happiest impulse when his eye is dim with tears; Constable's when his whole being is aglow with the rapture of beauty. Tears fall from the poet's eyes in the following sonnet, but they fall like rain in sun

shine. The occasion is his lady's walking in a garden :

"My lady's presence makes the roses red

Because to see her lips they blush for shame :

The lily's leaves for envy pale became,

And her white hands in them this envy bred.
The marigold abroad its leaves did spread

Because the sun's and her power is the same;
The violet of purple colour came,

Dyed with the blood she made my heart to shed.
In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take;
From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed;
The living heat which her eyebeams do make
Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed.
The rain wherewith she watereth these flowers

Falls from mine eyes which she dissolves in showers."

The following is more characteristic of his soaring ardour —“rapture all air and fire;" though the structure is somewhat artificial :

"Blame not my heart for flying up so high,

Sith thou art cause that it this flight begun,
For earthly vapours, drawn up by the sun,
Comets become, and night-suns in the sky.
My humble heart so with thy heavenly eye
Drawn up aloft, all low desires doth shun :
Raise thou me up, as thou my heart hast done,

So during night, in heaven remain may I.
Blame not, I say again, my high desire,
Sith of us both the cause thereof depends:

In thee doth shine, in me doth burn a fire;
Fire draweth up others, and itself ascends.

Thine eye a fire, and so draws up my love;
My love a fire, and so ascends above."

The most exquisite of his sonnets for sweet colour and winning fancy is that where he compares his love to a beggar at the door of beauty

Pity refusing my poor Love to feed,

A beggar starved for want of help he lies,
And at your mouth, the door of beauty, cries
That thence some alms of sweet grants may proceed.
But as he waiteth for some almës-deed,

A cherry tree before the door he spies-
O dear, quoth he, two cherries may suffice,
Two only life may save in this my need.

But beggars can they nought but cherries eat?
Pardon my Love, he is a goddess' son,

And never feedeth but of dainty meat,
Else need he not to pine as he hath done.
For only the sweet fruit of this sweet tree
Can give food to my love, and life to me."

In one of his sonnets he makes the same glorious claim for his lady that Shakespeare makes for the fair youth of his adoration

"Miracle of the world! I never will deny

That former poets praise the beauty of their days;
But all those beauties were but figures of thy praise,
And all those poets did of thee but prophesy."

His amorous sonnets and other light poems were the effusions of his youth, and like Spenser he turned in his older years to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. He concludes his love-sonnets by saying

"For if none ever loved like me, then why

Still blameth he the things he doth not know?
And he that hath so loved will favour show,

For he hath been a fool as well as I."

R

And adds in prose-"When I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours writ, did amount just to the climacterical number 63; methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the remnant of wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter." There can be little doubt that the beautiful "spiritual sonnets" ascribed to him by Mr Park, and printed in vol. ii. of the 'Heliconia,' are his composition. Those addressed to "our Blessed Lady" are particularly fine.

IV. THOMAS LODGE (1556-1625).

Lodge, the next in order of our sonneteers, led rather a varied life. His father was a grocer in London, who in 1563 attained to the dignity of Lord Mayor. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1573, and Lincoln's Inn in 1578; but literature seems to have had more attraction for him than the bar. In 1586, and again in 1591-3, we find him engaged in privateering expeditions to the West Indies, in search of excitement and adventure. He belonged to the wild society of Greene, Marlowe, and Nash; but if he took much part in their dissipations, he had strength enough to survive it, and when the leaders of the set died off, he became sober and respectable, studied medicine, gave up poetry, and spent the leisure of his professional life in translating Josephus, and the "works, both natural and moral,” of Seneca. His chief productions were-A 'Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage-Plays,' in reply to Stephen Gosson's 'School of Abuse,' 1580; 'Alarm against Usurers,' along with the novelette of 'Forbonius and Prisceria,' 1584; 'Scylla's Metamorphosis,' with "sundry most absolute Poems and Sonnets," 1589; 'Euphues Golden Legacy,' (reprinted in Mr Collier's 'Shakespeare's Library,' as being the basis of "As You Like It," 1590; 'Phyllis honoured with Pastoral Sonnets,' 1593; 'The Wounds of Civil War,' a tragedy on the history of Marius and Sylla, 1594; 'A Fig for Momus,' a body of satires, 1595; 'Wit's Misery and the