Was over-wrought, and shapes of naked boyes, Of which some seemed with lively jollitee To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,1 And over all of purest gold was spred A trayle of yvie in his native hew; That wight who did not well avis'd it vew, Infinit streames continually did well Out of this fountaine, sweet and faire to see, That like a little lake it seemd to bee; Whose depth exceeded not three cubits hight, That seemed the fountaine in that sea did sayle upright. Eftsoones' they heard a most melodious sound, Was there consorted in one harmonee; Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree. The joyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade, 1 Sports. 2 Bathe. 3 Person. 4 Basin. 5 Forthwith. • Could. The silver sounding instruments did meet FURTHER READINGS-IN BOOK I.-Opening stanzas of Canto I.; some stanzas of Canto II., beginning with the seventh; opening stanzas of Canto III., and of Canto IV.; some stanzas of Canto V., beginning with the eighteenth; some stanzas of Canto X., beginning with the twelfth, and also some beginning with the fifty-first; and concluding stanzas of Canto XII., beginning at the twentieth. LESSON 22. THE FOUR PHASES OF THE LATER ELIZABETHAN POETRY.— "Spenser reflected in his poems the spirit of the English Renaissance. The other poetry of Elizabeth's reign reflected the whole of English Life. The best way to arrange it—omitting as yet the Drama―is in an order parallel to the growth of the national life, and the proof that it is the best way is that on the whole such an order is a true chronological order. First, then, if we compare England after 1580, as writers have often done, to an ardent youth, we shall find, in the poetry of the first years that followed that date, all the elements of youth. It is a poetry of love and romance and fancy. Secondly, and later on, when Englishmen grew older in feeling, their unsettled enthusiasm, which had flitted here and there in action and literature over all kinds of subjects, settled down into a steady enthusiasm for England itself. The country entered on its early manhood, and parallel with this there is the great outburst of historical plays, and a set of poets whom I will call the patriotic poets. Thirdly, and later still, all enthusiasm died down into a graver and more thoughtful national life, and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare and the poets whom I will call philosophical. These three classes of Poets overlapped one another, and grew up 1 Varied. gradually, but on the whole their succession represents a real succession of national thought and emotion. A fourth and separate phase does not represent, as these do, a new national life, a new religion, and new politics, but the despairing struggle of the old faith against the new. There were numbers of men such as Wordsworth has finely sketched in old Norton in the Doe of Rylstone, who vainly strove in sorrow against all the new national elements. ROBERT SOUTHWELL, of Norfolk, a Jesuit priest, was the poet of Roman Catholic England. Imprisoned for three years, racked ten times, and finally executed, he wrote during his prison time his two longest poems, St. Peter's Complaint, and Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears, and it marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in the country but also the strange contrasts of the time that eleven editions of poems with these titles were published between 1593 and 1600, at a time when the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare led the way for a multitude of poems that sang of love and delight and England's glory. To the first three we now turn. THE LOVE POETRY.-I have called it by this name, because in all its best work (to be found in the first book of Mr. Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury') it is almost limited to that subject—the subject of youth. It is chiefly composed in the form of songs and sonnets, and was published in miscellanies in and after 1600. The most famous of these, in which men like Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, Rd. Barnefield, and others wrote, are England's Helicon and Davison's Rhapsody and the Passionate Pilgrim. The latter contained some poems of Shakespeare, and he is by virtue of these, and the songs in his Dramas, the best of these lyric writers. The songs themselves are old and plain, and dallying with the innocence of love.' They have natural sweetness, great simplicity of speech, and directness of statement. Some, as Shakespeare's, possess a 'passionate reality;' others a quaint pastoralism like shepherd life in porcelain, such as Marlowe's well known song, Come live with me and be my love;' others a splendor of love and beauty as in Lodge's Song of Rosaline, and Spenser's on his marriage. The sonnets were written chiefly in series, and I have already said that such writers are called amourists. Such were Shakespeare's and the Amoretti of Spenser, and those to Diana by Constable. They were sometimes mixed with Canzones and Ballatas after the Italian manner, and the best of these were a series by Sir Philip Sidney. A number of other sonnets and of longer love poems were written by the dramatists before Shakespeare, by Peele and Greene and Marlowe and Lodge, far the finest being the Hero and Leander, which Marlowe left as a fragment to be completed by Chapman. Mingled up with these were small religious poems, the reflection of the Puritan and the more religious Church element in English society. They were collected under such titles as the Handful of Honeysuckles, the Poor Widow's Mite, Psalms and Sonnets, and there are some good things among them written by William Hunnis. In one Scotch poet, WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN, the friend of Ben Jonson, the love poet and the religious poet were united. I mention him here, though his work properly belongs to the reign of James I., because his poetry really goes back in spirit and feeling to this time. He cannot be counted among the true Scottish poets. Drummond is entirely Elizabethan and English, and he is worthy to be named among the lyrical poets below Spenser and Shakespeare. His love sonnets have as much grace as Sidney's and less quaintness, his songs have often the grave simplicity of Wyatt's, and his religious poems, especially one solemn sonnet on John the Baptist, have a distant resemblance to the grandeur of Milton. THE PATRIOTIC POETRY.--Among all this poetry of Romance, Chivalry, Religion, and Love, rose a poetry which devoted. itself to the glory of England. It was chiefly historical, and as it may be said to have had its germ in the Mirror of Magistrates, so it had its perfect flower in the historical drama of Shakespeare. Men had now begun to have a great pride in England. She had stepped into the foremost rank, had outwitted France, subdued internal foes, beaten and humbled Spain on every sea. Hence the history of the land became precious, and the very rivers and hills and plains honorable, and to be sung and praised in verse. This poetic impulse is best represented in the works of three men-WILLIAM WARNER, SAMUEL DANIEL, and MICHAEL DRAYTON. Born within a few years of each other, about 1560, they all lived beyond the century, and the national poetry they set on foot lasted when the romantic poetry died. WILLIAM WARNER'S great book was Albion's England, 1586, a history of England in verse from the Deluge to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, humorous, crowded with stories, and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity was great, and the English in which it was written deserved it. Such stories as Argentile and Curan and the Patient Countess prove him to have had a true and pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not, however, better than that of well-languaged DANIEL,' who, among tragedies and pastoral comedies and poems of pure fancy, wrote in verse a prosaic History of the Civil Wars, 1595, as we have already found him writing history in prose. Spenser saw in him a new 'shepherd' of poetry who did far surpass the others, and Coleridge says that the style of his Hymen's Triumph may be declared 'imperishable English.' 6 Of the three the greatest poet was DRAYTON. Two historical poems are his work-the Civil Wars of Edward II. and the Barons, and England's Heroical Epistles, 1598. Not content with these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyolbion, thirty books, and more than 30,000 lines. It is a description in Alexandrines of the tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remarkable stories, antiquities, wonders, |