MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS. My mind to me a kingdom is, Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That earth affords or grows by kind: Though much I want which most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave. No princely pomp, no wealthy store, No wily wit to salve a sore, No shape to feed a loving eye; I see how plenty [surfeits] oft, Mishap doth threaten most of all; Content to live, this is my stay; I seek no more than may suffice; Some have too much, yet still do crave; They poor, I rich; they beg, I give ; They lack, I leave; they pine, I live. I laugh not at another's loss; I grudge not at another's pain; Some weigh their pleasure by their lust, A cloaked craft their store of skill: My wealth is health and perfect ease: TO PHILLIS THE FAIR SHEPHERDESS. My Phillis hath the morning Sun, And Phillis hath morn-waking birds, My Phillis hath prime feathered flowers, And Phillis hath a gallant flock That leaps since she doth own them. But Phillis hath too hard a heart, It yields no mercy to desert Nor grace to those that crave it. Sweet Sun, when thou look'st on, To yield some pity woo her! Tell her, her beauty dreads one. And if in life her love she nill agree me, HELEN'S EPITHALAMION. [From the Sixe Idillia.] Like as the rising morning shows a grateful lightening, Or in a garden is a Cypress tree, or in a trace A steed of Thessaly, so she to Sparta was a grace. No damsel with such works as she her baskets used to fill, Doth cut from off the loom; nor any hath such songs and lays THE PRAYER OF THEOCRITUS FOR SYRACUSE. (Idyll 16.) O Jupiter, and thou Minerva fierce in fight, And thou Proserpina, who with thy mother hast renown Along the Sardine sea, that death of friends they may relate And let the spiders spread their slender webs in armories, And warlike Hiero. Ye Graces who keep resiance In the Thessalian mount Orchomenus, to Thebes of old for what to men can lovely be [Born about 1555: died before 1616. His Diana was first published in 1592. An edition by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt was published by Pickering in 1859.] Almost nothing is known of the life of Henry Constable. He belonged to a Yorkshire family; he was educated at Cambridge; he was acquainted with the Earl of Essex, with Anthony Bacon, with the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, with the Countess of Pembroke and Lady Rich. His sonnets to the soul of Sir Philip Sidney seem to prove that he was honoured with the friendship of the auther of the Defence of Poesie. As a Catholic and an honest man,' as he calls himself, Constable could not escape suspicion in the suspicious England of his time. He passed much of his life in exile, wandering in France, Scotland, Italy, and Poland, and was acquainted with prisons and courts. The slight but graceful genius of Constable is best defined by some of the epithets which his contemporary critics employed. They spoke of his 'pure, quick, and high delivery of conceit.' Ben Jonson alludes to his 'ambrosiac muse.' His secular poems are 'Certaine sweete sonnets in the praise of his mistress, Diana,' conceived in the style of Ronsard and the Italians. The verses of his later days, when he had learned, as he says, 'to live alone with God,' are also sonnets in honour of the saints, and chiefly of Mary Magdalene. They are ingenious, and sometimes too cleverly confuse the passions of divine and earthly love. In addition to the sonnets we have four pleasant lyrics which Constable contributed to England's Helicon. We select two of these pastorals, one being an idyllic dialogue between two shepherdesses; the other, 'The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis.' These things have at once the freshness of a young, and the trivial grace of a decadent literature, so curiously varied were the influences of the Renaissance in England. Shakespeare and Constable begin where Bion leaves off. Constable was neither more nor less than a fair example of a poet who followed rather than set the fashion. His sonnets were charged and overladen with ingenious conceits, but the freshness, the music, of his more free and flowing lyrics remain, and keep their charm. A. LANG. |