It was into its Sonnets, however, that he threw his full strength. Of the whole hundred and eight it is no exaggeration to say that they will stand comparison, if not with an incomparable dozen, with the rest of Shakespeare's. The famous thirty-first, with a little less wit, and a little more feeling, would be perfect :

With how sad steps, O Moone, thou clim'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wanne a face!

What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busie archer his sharpe arrowes tries!
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I reade it in thy lookes; thy languisht grace,
To me, that feele the like, thy state discries.
Then, e'en of fellowship, O Moone, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet

Those lovers scorne whom that love doth possesse ?
Doe they call vertue there ungratefulnesse ? 9

In another the personal element captivates :
Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes

And of some sent from that sweet enemy Fraunce;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advaunce,

Towne folkes my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise ;
Some luckie wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I doe take
My blood from them who did excell in this,
Thinke Nature me a man-at-armes did make.
How farre they shot awrie! the true cause is,
Stella lookt on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beames which made so faire my race.10

His heart, habitually humble and abashed in Stella's

presence, is speedily intoxicated with the sweetness of a sudden taste of audacity:

My Starre, because a sugred kisse

In sport I suckt while she asleepe did lye,

Doth lowre, nay chide, nay threat for only this!
Sweet, it was saucie Love, not humble I.

But no 'scuse serves; she makes her wrath appeare
In Beautie's throne: see now, who dares come neare
Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloudie paine.

O heav'nly foole, thy most kisse-worthy face

Anger invests with such a lovely grace,

That Anger's selfe I needs must kisse againe.11

A stray ringlet at once shames the Mistress and enraptures her Servant :

O happie Thames, that didst my Stella beare!
I saw thee with full many a smiling line

Upon thy cheerefull face, Joye's livery weare,

While those faire planets on thy streames did shine.

The boate for joy could not to daunce forbear,
While wanton winds, with beauties so divine
Ravisht, staid not, till in her golden haire

They did themselves, O sweetest prison, twine.
And faine those Aeol's youth there would their stay
Have made, but forst by Nature still to flie,
First did with puffing kisse those lockes display!
She, so disheuld, blusht: from window I

With sight thereof cride out, 'O faire disgrace,
Let Honor's selfe to thee grant highest place.'

12

And then, suddenly, in the midst of the amorous frolic, figuring as a mere tag to the trifling, starts up now and again a big thought :

Cease, eager Muse; peace, pen; for my sake stay;

I give you here my hand for truth of this,

Wise silence is best musicke unto blisse.13

In that capacious province of English verse occupied by

the Sonnet, it would be hard to discover more than one or two series to place by the side of Astrophel and Stella's. Single surpassing specimens, I am aware, could be cited; among them, that by Sidney himself in the collection known as Sidera:

Oft have I musde, but now at length I finde

Why those that die, men say they do depart:
Depart! a word so gentle to my minde,

Weakely did seeme to paint Death's ougly dart.
But now the starres, with their strange course, do binde
Me one to leave, with whom I leave my heart;

I heare a crye of spirits fainte and blinde
That parting thus, my chiefest part I part.
Part of my life, the loathed part to me,

Lives to impart my wearie clay some breath;
But that good part wherein all comforts be,

Now dead, doth shew departure is a death;

Yea, worse than death; death parts both woe and joy,
From joy I part, still living in annoy.14

But few clusters vie with the other. There we have miniature painting of a consummate kind; delicate tracery of all conceivable emotions of the persons in the given circumstances principally concerned-the friend, the lover, the mistress, all, that is, but the husband. The colours, mixed more, it is true, with brain than heart, still are of real passion for the time being, evoked by an effort of will. Doubtless, the entire shining structure is a palace of ice, a mirage in the desert. At all events it is extraordinarily artistic and symmetrical. Given the latitude of speech and feeling in the period, it is moral also. Sidney in a dissolute age was no libertine. None in his own time believed that he cherished designs against the honour of Essex's sister, his own once promised bride, now the neglected wife of a titled clown. The generous purpose of the poems

may well have been to console, exalt the victim, by representing her with all her charms as bravely faithful to vows her husband had not kept; as resisting triumphantly temptation, however noble, ardent, and dear the tempter.

The present inability of Sidney's verse to attract readers is not flattering to modern taste, in view of the intrinsic merits. The failure is not astonishing when the change in the literary standpoint is considered. Modern poetry labours to turn the stream of its especial subject into the channel of common human nature. It was Browning's object as much as Tennyson's. It is the only receipt in literature for evading superannuation. From Sidney to Waller, the aim of courtly verse was to individualize emotions equally with manners. The theme was enclosed in a private pool, where every incident of its being, and growth, could not fail to be remarked. When it is in itself worthy, and the observer has sympathy and soul to analyse its properties, it proves to be still a pearl of price. In default of the rightful combination, much in Sidney, something in a greater genius, everything in a pile of more ordinary Elizabethan and Jacobean verse, appears to be nothing but a collection of ingenious grotesques. Elizabethan love-poetry, in its beauties and its paradoxes, is paralleled by the sacred poetry of the following generation. With a fit infusion of sensibility and passion both sorts become delightfully extraordinary. Without the addition they are extraordinary without the delightfulness.

Fashion is as omnipotent, except for an occasional rebel, in literature as in social habits and customs. In the golden days of Elizabeth, and a generation or two later, it decreed that poetry, other than dramatic, should be the diversion and the privilege of a few, of scholars and society. Shakespeare himself, in his character of poet, obeyed the edict.

6

Had he been born noble and wealthy, with no compulsion to be intelligible to a multitude, he possibly might have preferred throughout the honours of a sonneteer to the immortality of the creator of Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Hamlet. Sidney, a courtier, admired, beloved, a poet born, was free to choose. Though he selects for praise, as excellently done', Troilus and Cressida—not the Canterbury Tales, he had studied Chaucer. He panegyrizes him, notwithstanding'great wants fit to be forgiven in so reverend antiquity'! 15 While 'confessing his own barbarousness', he says he never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that he found not his heart moved more than with a trumpet '.16 Yet he could not oppose fashion's ordinance on the legitimate purpose and aspiration of sonnet and song. He was content to set himself as poet the task of hymning his mistress's eyebrow. The applause most valued in his period, his lady's and the Court's, he won. He has paid for it by having become in popular opinion antiquated. Whether he had it in him to be a singer for all time, as is his illustrious contemporary in the lyrics of the Plays, none can decide. That contemporary himself did not essay to be at once musical and spontaneous, unless with a people's drama for a vehicle to carry and excuse poetry not à la mode. We can only wish that Sidney had tried.

The poetic school which was Sidney's died a natural death more than two centuries ago. Alike in Italy, France, Spain, and England, it originated in a world of less diffused intellectual atmosphere and friction than ours; in a world where the wheels turned more slowly round; in a more contracted circle of possible appreciation, but where any was tenfold more intense for the narrowness. The selfdedicated poet had no ambition for his own Muse to move