Good Spirits.

What have you won by this, but that curst under Sin,

You make and mar; throw down and raise; as ever to begin; Like meteors in the air, you blaze but to burn out;

And change your shapes-like phantom'd clouds-to leave weak eyes in doubt.

Not Truth but truth-like grounds you work upon,

Varying in all but this, that you can never long be one:
Then play here with your art, false miracle devise ;

Deceive, and be deceivèd still, be foolish and seem wise;

In Peace erect your thrones, your delicacy spread;

The flowers of time corrupt, soon spring, and are as quickly dead.

Let War, which-tempest-like-all with itself o'erthrows,
Make of this diverse world a stage of blood-enamelled shows.
Successively both these yet this fate follow will,

That all their glories be no more than change from ill to ill.

SEED-TIME AND HARVEST.

[From Caelica, Sonnet XL.]

The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing

Flatters our hopes and tickles our desire;

Nature's true riches in sweet beauties shewing,
Which set all hearts with labour's love on fire.
No less fair is the wheat when golden ear,
Shews unto hope the joys of near enjoying:
Fair and sweet is the bud; more sweet and fair
The rose, which proves that Time is not destroying.
Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight,
Enamel'd o'er with beauties white and red,
All sense and thoughts did to belief invite,

That love and glory there are brought to bed;

And your ripe years, Love, now they grow no higher,

Turn all the spirits of man into desire1.

1 The reading of these last two lines is conjectural.

ELIZABETHA REGINA.

[From Caelica, Sonnet LXXXII.]

Under a throne I saw a virgin sit,

The red and white rose quartered in her face,
Star of the North!-and for true guards to it,
Princes, church, states, all pointing out her grace.
The homage done her was not born of Wit;
Wisdom admir'd, Zeal took Ambition's place,
State in her eyes taught Order how to fit
And fix Confusion's unobserving race.

Fortune can here claim nothing truly great,
But that this princely creature is her seat.

SONNET.

[From Caelica, Sonnet CX.]

Sion lies waste, and Thy Jerusalem,
O Lord, is fall'n to utter desolation;
Against Thy prophets and Thy holy men,
There sin hath wrought a fatal combination :
Profan'd Thy name, Thy worship overthrown,
And made Thee, living Lord, a God unknown.

Thy powerful laws, Thy wonders of creation,
Thy word incarnate, glorious heaven, dark hell,
Lie shadowed under man's degeneration;
Thy Christ still crucified for doing well;
Impiety, O Lord, sits on Thy throne,

Which makes Thee living Lord, a God unknown.

Man's superstition hath Thy truth entombed,
His atheism again her pomps defaceth;

That sensual, insatiable vast womb,

Of thy seen Church, Thy unseen Church disgraceth; There lives no truth, with them that seem Thine own, Which makes Thee, living Lord, a God unknown.

Yet unto Thee, Lord-mirror of transgression-
We who for earthly idols have forsaken,
Thy heavenly image-sinless, pure impression-
And so in nets of vanity lie taken,

All desolate implore that to Thine own,
Lord, Thou no longer live a God unknown.

Yea, Lord, let Israel's plagues not be eternal,
Nor sin for ever cloud Thy sacred mountains,
Nor with false flames spiritual but infernal,
Dry up Thy Mercy's ever springing fountains:
Rather, sweet Jesus, fill up time and come,
To yield to sin her everlasting doom.

AN ELEGY ON SIR PHILIP SIDNEY1.

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,

Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of

our age;

Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now, Enraged I write, I know not what; dead-quick-I know not how.

Hard-hearted minds relent and Rigour's tears abound,

And Envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault she found.
Knowledge her light hath lost, Valour hath slain her knight,
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.

Place pensive wails his fall, whose presence was her pride,
Time crieth out, my ebb is come; his life was my spring-tide!
Fame mourns in that she lost the ground of her reports,
Each living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts.

He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind
A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,
Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ,
Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.

1 The authorship of this poem is by no means certain. Lamb however believed it to be by Lord Brooke.

Farewell to you my hopes, my wonted waking dreams,
Farewell sometimes enjoyèd joy, eclipsèd are thy beams,
Farewell self-pleasing thoughts, which quietness brings forth,
And farewell friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth.

And farewell merry heart, the gift of guiltless minds,
And all sports, which for life's restore, variety assigns:
Let all that sweet is void; in me no mirth may dwell;
Philip the cause of all this woe, my life's content, farewell!

Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life yet knows not how to kill,
Go, seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,

Salute the stones that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind.

SIR EDWARD DYER.

[Born about 1550 at Sharpham near Glastonbury; educated at Balliol College, Oxford; ambassador to Denmark 1589; knighted 1596; died 1607.]

Sir Edward Dyer, ‘for Elegy most sweete, solempne and of high conceit,' according to a contemporary judgment, makes the last in importance, though the first in date, of that trio of poet-friends celebrated in Sidney's well-known Pastoral:

'Join hearts and hands, so let it be:

Make but one mind in bodies three.'

Very little authentic verse of his is now extant, nor is it probable that he produced much. On the other hand he has been freely credited with verses that do not belong to him, especially with certain poems that are now known to be by Lodge. Mr. Grosart has collected twelve pieces which may be attributed to him with a fair amount of certainty. Of these 'A Fancy' is interesting as having provoked a much better poem on the same model by Lord Brooke, and a later imitation by Robert Southwell. It is however too rambling and unequal for quotation. Dyer is now remembered by one poem only, the well-known 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' which though fluent and spirited verse, probably owes most of its reputation to the happiness of its opening. The little poem 'To Phillis the Fair Shepherdess' is in the lighter, less hackneyed Elizabethan vein, and makes a welcome interlude among the 'woeful ballads' which immediately surround it in England's Helicon, where it first appeared. Still, when all is said, Dyer, a man of action and affairs rather than of letters, is chiefly interesting for his connection with Sidney and Greville; and that stiff pathetic engraving of Sidney's funeral, which represents him as pall-bearer side by side with Lord Brooke, throws a light upon his memory that none of his poems have power to shed.

The last two extracts given below are taken from a book of which an apparently unique copy (dated 1588) is preserved in the Bodleian Library, under the title of Sixe Idillia (from Theocritus). Mr. Collier attributes this book to Dyer, on the ground of the initials E. D. given on the back of the title-page. This is weak evidence, but the fluency and sweetness of the translations make us loth to reject it.

MARY A. WARD.