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A DIRGE.

Ring out your bells, let mourning shews be spread; For Love is dead:

All Love is dead, infected

With plague of deep disdain :

Worth, as nought worth, rejected, And Faith fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Weep, neighbours, weep; do you not hear it said That Love is dead?

His death-bed, peacock's folly;

His winding-sheet is shame ;

His will, false-seeming wholly ;

His sole executor, blame.

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read,

For Love is dead;

Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth

My mistress' marble heart;

Which epitaph containeth,

'Her eyes were once his dart.'

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Alas, I lie rage hath this error bred;

Love is not dead;

Love is not dead; but sleepeth
In her unmatched mind,

Where she his counsel keepeth,
Till due deserts she find.

Therefore from so vile fancy,
To call such wit a frenzy,
Who Love can temper thus,
Good Lord, deliver us!

I.

Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare,
Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought:
Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care;
Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought :
Desire! Desire! I have too dearly bought,
With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware;
Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,
Who should my mind to higher things prepare.
But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought;
In vain thou mad'st me to vain things aspire;
In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire;
For Virtue hath this better lesson taught,—
Within myself to seek my only hire,
Desiring nought but how to kill Desire.

2.

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine, and give us sight to see.

O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide

In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how ill becometh him to slide,

Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see:
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me!

· FROM THE 'ARCADIA.'

Dorus to Pamela.

My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve ; Their pasture is fair hills of fruitless love,

On barren sweets they feed, and feeding starve.

I wail their lot, but will not other prove;

My sheephook is wan hope, which all upholds ;

My weeds Desire, cut out in endless folds;

What wool my sheep shall bear, whilst thus they live, In you it is, you must the judgment give.

Night.

O Night, the ease of care, the pledge of pleasure,
Desire's best mean, harvest of hearts affected,
The seat of peace, the throne which is erected
Of human life to be the quiet measure;
Be victor still of Phoebus' golden treasure,

Who hath our sight with too much sight infected;
Whose light is cause we have our lives neglected,
Turning all Nature's course to self displeasure.
These stately stars in their now shining faces,
With sinless sleep, and silence wisdom's mother,
Witness his wrong which by thy help is easèd:
Thou art, therefore, of these our desert places
The sure refuge; by thee and by no other
My soul is blest, sense joy'd, and fortune raised.

FULKE GREVILLE,

LORD BROOKE.

[FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE, born 1554, was the school-fellow and friend of Sidney. He held two important offices under Elizabeth's government, that of Secretary to the Principality of Wales (1583), and that of Treasurer of Marine Causes (1597). He seems to have spent the early years of James' reign in retirement, returning to Court about 1614, in which year he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor. In 1620 he was created Baron Brooke of Beauchamp's Court, and died in 1628 from the effects of a wound given him by a servant. The only works published in his lifetime were an elegiac poem on Sidney in Phoenix Nest (1593), a poem in Bodenham's Belvedere (1600), three poems in England's Helicon, and the Tragedy of Mustapha in 1609. An edition of his works, excluding the Poems of Monarchy and Religion (published 1670) appeared in 1633. In 1870 his complete works, prose and verse, were edited in the Fuller Worthies Library by the Rev. A. B. Grosart.]

The poems of Lord Brooke, written for the most part 'in his youth and familar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney,' according to the title page of the 1633 editions, have a real and permanent value, though they can never hope to appeal to any other than a limited and so to speak professional audience. They are the work of a man of great thinking power, and of singular nobility and uprightness of character. The sheer power of mind shewn in these strange plays and treatises and so-called sonnets is undeniable. Every now and then it leads their author to a genuine success, to a fine chorus, a speech of weird and concentrated passion as impressive as a speech of Ford's, though even less human, a shorter poem of real and fanciful beauty. But generally we find this inborn power struggling with a medium of expression so cumbrous and intricate and stumbling, that neither thought nor fancy can find their way through it.

Words are taxed beyond what they can bear; all thoughts, whether great or trivial, are tortured into the same over-laboured dress; there is no ease, no flow, no joy. More than this; not only is the manner far removed from the true manner of poetry, but in

large tracts of it the matter handled has nothing to do with poetry, 'The Declination of Monarchy,' 'Of Weak-minded Tyrants,' ' Of Laws,' 'Of Nobility,' 'Of Commerce,' 'Of Crown Revenue,'-these are not the subjects of the poet. In the seventeenth century they were the subjects of the pamphleteer, and no one could have treated them in prose with greater ability and a more Miltonic swing and pregnancy of phrase than Lord Brooke. Buried in pages of wearisome verse, his discussions of these and such-like topics, in spite of acuteness, in spite of a wide and modern political view, are intolerable as poetry and unreadable as political and philosophical argument. His theory-as it was the theory of so many of his later contemporaries, of Sir John Davies, of Christopher Brooke, and Sir William Alexander-seems to have been that all subjects of serious human interest were equally within the sphere of poetry, or could be turned into poetry by a sort of coup de main. On the other hand, he not only attempted to treat scientific matter poetically, but also to treat genuinely poetical matter, such as natural beauty or human passion, or religious emotion, scientifically, making analysis and comparison play the part of feeling, and preserving the same stiffness and pedantry of movement in the most passionate or graceful situations. Yet at bottom Lord Brooke had many of the poet's gifts. His worst things contain a scant measure of fine lines and passages, such as perhaps few other Elizabethan writers below the first circle could have written, expressed with admirable resonance and terseness. At his best he rises very high, as we hope to show in the following extracts. But of the exquisite Elizabethan fluency and archness, the transparent sweetness of Spenser, the spontaneity and brilliancy of Sidney, Lord Brooke had little or nothing. His poetry bears witness in an extraordinary degree to the mental energy and acuteness of the time; it is wholly lacking in the Elizabethan charm. Sir William Davenant is reported to have said of him, that he had written good poetry in his youth and had then spoilt it by keeping it by him till old age. Lord Brooke's own explanation of the peculiar quality of his work however goes deeper than this. In the so-called Life of Sidney, after making a half apology for the romance and fancifulness of Sidney's Arcadia, and justifying the book as after all not lacking in 'images and examples (as directing threads) to guide every man through the confused Labyrinth of his own desires and life,' he continues : 'For my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit, and therefore chose not

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