'At last, when I perceived both eyes and heart
Excuse themselves, as guiltless of my ill,
I found myself the cause of all my smart,

And told myself that I myself would kill :
Yet when I saw myself to you was true,

I loved myself, because myself loved you.'

This eighteen-lined construction seems to have been a favourite form with Raleigh, as at least two other such pieces can be ascribed to him on good authority:

and

'Like hermit poor in pensive place obscure;'

'Many desire, but few or none deserve.'

But his lamentations over love's 'perplexities' may perhaps appear to us to be more ponderous than 'passionate;' and there is no temptation to linger among these rather heavy-footed verses. It is remarkable that one character runs through them all. They were evidently written without the pressure of the spur, which roused him to give rapidity and forceful directness to some later poems. They bear witness to a temper which was rather melancholy than lightsome; as though his early character had been disciplined by the grave sense of responsibility which he had learnt in Ireland, in France, and in other scenes of serious action. But there are two at least among his (presumably) early poems which move with a much lighter spring. One is the well-known reply to Marlowe's 'Come live with me and be my love,' which was 'made,' says honest Izaak Walton, by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days:'

'If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.'

But even these bright verses are a message of melancholy. He
characteristically throws cold water on the buoyancy of sanguine
youth, by reminding the shepherd of the near approach of
winter, and the transitory character of his pastoral delights:—
'All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

'But could youth last, and love still breed;

Had joys no date, nor age no need;

* We might add one other if we could be sure that Raleigh wrote it'Shepherd, what's love? I pray thee tell.

Then

Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.'

The other piece referred to is 'The Silent Lover' :—

'Wrong not, sweet empress of

The merit of true passion,

my heart,

With thinking that he feels no smart
That sues for no compassion.'

The whole piece has a marvellously modern look about it, especially the well-known stanza, which has sometimes been ascribed to a far later writer :

'Silence in love bewrays more woe

Than words, though ne'er so witty :

A beggar that is dumb, you know,
May challenge double pity.'

It is certainly difficult to ascribe these lines to the same heavy hand which wrote some of his other earlier pieces; yet it is characteristic that in older copies they are often found to be prefaced by six longer lines, written in his most sententious manner, beginning

'Passions are likened best to floods and streams.'

Three other pieces of this early period claim our attention. (1.) The grandest of his shorter compositions is the sonnet, A vision upon this conceit of the Faery Queen ;' appended to the first three books of Spenser's great poem published in 1590:

'Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and, passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair love and fairer virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen,

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended; in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,

And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce;
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And cursed the access of that celestial thief.'

(2.) The stateliest of these early poems is the epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney, referred to above:

To praise thy life or wail thy worthy death.'
2 K

Vol. 168.-No. 336.

Let

Let us quote a few excellent and characteristic lines:

And I, that in thy time and living state

Did only praise thy virtues in my thought,
As one that seeld the rising sun hath sought,
With words and tears now wail thy timeless fate.
'Drawn was thy race aright from princely line;
Nor less than such, by gifts that nature gave,
The common mother that all creatures have,
Doth virtue shew, and princely lineage shine.
'A king gave thee thy name; a kingly mind,-
That God thee gave; who found it now too dear
For this base world, and hath resumed it near
To sit in skies, and sort with powers divine.

Kent thy birth-days, and Oxford held thy youth;

The heavens made haste, and stayed nor years nor time;
The fruits of age grew ripe in thy first prime;
Thy will, thy words; thy words the seals of truth.
'Great gifts and wisdom rare employed thee thence,
To treat from kings with those more great than kings;
Such hope men had to lay the highest things
On thy wise youth, to be transported hence.'

(3.) The most condensed piece is the Poesy to prove affection is not love,' which was first printed, we believe, in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody,' 1602; and of which Archbishop Trench writes,* that the poem is abundantly worthy of him; there have been seldom profounder thoughts more perfectly expressed than in the fourth and fifth stanzas ;' which we annex in willing deference to the judgment of so sound a critic :

:

'Desire himself runs out of breath,

And, getting, doth but gain his death;
Desire nor reason hath nor rest,
And, blind, doth seldom choose the best:
Desire attained is not desire,

But as the cinders of the fire.

'As ships in ports desired are drowned,
As fruit, once ripe, then falls to ground,
As flies that seek for flames are brought
To cinders by the flames they sought;
So fond desire when it attains,

The life expires, the woe remains.'

But it is time that we should turn to what we may call the 'Cynthia cycle,' and try to ascertain how much we know about

*Household Book of English Poetry,' p. 397, 3rd ed.

that

that poem, and how much light our knowledge throws on Raleigh's character.

Of the passing clouds which chequered the years of his prosperity, the one which drove him to Ireland in some sort of disgrace in 1589 must certainly be regarded as a 'blessing in disguise.' We know nothing of its causes, except that a contemporary letter tells us that my Lord of Essex chased' him from the Court, and confined him into Ireland.' But it led to his famous visit to Spenser at Kilcolman, and the lines, in which the greater poet records what happened at their meeting, form the most authentic statement of his poetical position up to that time.

Spenser tells us, then, that in the summer of 1589, Raleigh had already finished a considerable poem, called 'Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,' the object of which was to sing the praises of the Queen. Spenser describes the music and melody of the composition in the sonnet addressed to Raleigh, which he appended to the first Three Books of the 'Faery Queen' in 1590:

To thee, that art the summer's nightingale,

Thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight,
Why do I send this rustic madrigal,

That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite ?
Thou only fit this argument to write

In whose high thoughts pleasure hath built her bower,
And dainty love learned sweetly to indite.

My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour,

To taste the streams that, like a golden shower,

Flow from thy fruitful head of thy love's praise;

Fitter, perhaps, to thunder martial stower,

When so thee list thy lofty muse to raise :

Yet, till that thou thy poem wilt make known,

Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.'

Again, in the Introduction to the Third Book of the 'Faery Queen,' he refers to

That sweet verse, with nectar sprinkled,

In which a gracious servant pictured

His Cynthia, his heaven's fairest light.'

And in not less exalted language does he speak of it elsewhere. The subject and general character of the poem is unfolded with more precision in Colin Clout's come home again,' of which the dedication to Raleigh is dated in December 1591, though the book was not published till 1596. He describes how 'a strange shepherd,' styling himself the Shepherd of the Ocean,' found

* Edwards'' Life, &c.,' vol. i. p. 119.

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him

him out as he was sitting under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar,' amongst the coolly shade of the green alders by the Mulla's shore.' And he goes on to describe the that he 'piped' in response to some of Spenser's own:

'His song was all a lamentable lay

Of great unkindness and of usage hard,

Of Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,

Which from her presence faultless him debarred.'

poem

Of the original poem which is thus circumstantially described, it is not known that we possess a single verified fragment, though perhaps, as Oldys suggested (p. liv), we may find scraps in such lines as Puttenham quotes (p. 208), as 'written by Sir Walter Raleigh of his greatest mistress in most excellent verses' :

'In vain, mine eyes, in vain you waste your tears;
In vain my sighs, the smokes of my despairs;
In vain you search the earth and heavens above;
In vain ye seek; for fortune keeps my love.'

The following sonnet clearly belongs in subject to the Cynthia cycle, but it is framed too artificially to have formed a portion of a longer poem :

'FAREWELL TO THE COURt.

Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired,
And past return are all my dandled days,
My love misled, and fancy quite retired;
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
My lost delights, now clean from sight of land,
Have left me all alone in unknown ways,
My mind to woe, my life in fortune's hand;
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
As in a country strange without companion,
I only wail the wrong of death's delays,
Whose sweet spring spent, whose summer well-nigh done;
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays;

Whom care forewarns, ere age and winter cold,
To haste me hence, to find my fortune's fold.'

The keynote of these verses lingered ever in his memory. In the Hatfield fragment he quotes the words expressly:

"Of all which past, the sorrow only stays: "

So wrote I once and my mishap foretold,

My mind still feeling sorrowful success.'

And it occurs again some years later in prose in his 'History of the World' (p. 20, ed. Oldys): The last and seventh (age