holy cross, whence thy salvation came,On which thy Saviour and thy sin did die!
For in that sacred object is much pleasure,
And in that Saviour is my life, my treasure.
To thee, O Jesus, I direct my eyes;
To thee my hands, to thee my humble knees,
To thee my heart shall offer sacrifice;
To thee my thoughts, who my thoughts only sees—
To thee myself,—myself and all I give;
To thee I die; to thee I only live!
See what an effect of stately composure quiet artistic care produces, and how it leaves the ear of the mind in a satisfied peace!
There are a few fine lines in the poem. The last two lines of the first stanza are admirable; the last two of the second very weak. The last stanza is good throughout.
But it would be very unfair to judge Sir Walter by his verse. His prose is infinitely better, and equally displays the devout tendency of his mind—a tendency common to all the great men of that age. The worst I know of him is the selfishly prudent advice he left behind for his son. No doubt he had his faults, but we must not judge a man even by what he says in an over-anxiety for the prosperity of his child.
Another remarkable fact in the history of those great men is that they were all men of affairs. Raleigh was a soldier, a sailor, a discoverer, a politician, as well as an author. His friend Spenser was first secretary to Lord Grey when he was Governor of Ireland, and afterwards Sheriff of Cork. He has written a large treatise on the state of Ireland. But of all the men of the age no one was more variously gifted, or exercised those gifts in more differing directions, than the man who of them all was most in favour with queen, court, and people—Philip Sidney. I could write much to set forth the greatness, culture, balance, and scope of this wonderful man. Renowned over Europe for his person, for his dress, for his carriage, for his speech, for his skill in arms, for his horsemanship, for his soldiership, for his statesmanship, for his learning, he was beloved for his friendship, his generosity, his steadfastness, his simplicity, his conscientiousness, his religion. Amongst the lamentations over his death printed in Spenser's works, there is one poem by Matthew Roydon, a few verses of which I shall quote, being no vain eulogy. Describing his personal appearance, he says:
A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel books!—
I trow, that countenance cannot lie
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.
Was ever eye did see that face,
Was ever ear did hear that tongue,
Was ever mind did mind his grace
That ever thought the travel long?
But eyes and ears, and every thought,
Were with his sweet perfections caught.
His Arcadia is a book full of wisdom and beauty. None of his writings were printed in his lifetime; but the Arcadia was for many years after his death one of the most popular books in the country. His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh's, being less condensed and stately. It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his friend Spenser entertained when young; but there is often an exquisite art in his other poems.
The first I shall transcribe is a sonnet, to which the Latin words printed below it might be prefixed as a title: Splendidis longum valedico nugis.
A LONG FAREWELL TO GLITTERING TRIFLES
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:
What ever 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.
Oh take fast hold; let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth draws out to death;
And think how evil63 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.
Before turning to the treasury of his noblest verse, I shall give six lines from a poem in the Arcadia—chiefly for the sake of instancing what great questions those mighty men delighted in:
What essence destiny hath; if fortune be or no;
Whence our immortal souls to mortal earth do stow64:
What life it is, and how that all these lives do gather,
With outward maker's force, or like an inward father.
Such thoughts, me thought, I thought, and strained my single mind,
Then void of nearer cares, the depth of things to find.
Lord Bacon was not the only one, in such an age, to think upon the mighty relations of physics and metaphysics, or, as Sidney would say, "of naturall and supernaturall philosophic." For a man to do his best, he must be upheld, even in his speculations, by those around him.
In the specimen just given, we find that our religious poetry has gone down into the deeps. There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer. The alternative expressed in the middle couplet seems to me the most imperative of all questions—both for the individual and for the church: Is man fashioned by the hands of God, as a potter fashioneth his vessel; or do we indeed come forth from his heart? Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question aright possesses the key to all righteous questions.
Sir Philip and his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, made between them a metrical translation of the Psalms of David. It cannot be determined which are hers and which are his; but if I may conclude anything from a poem by the sister, to which I shall by and by refer, I take those I now give for the brother's work.
The souls of the following psalms have, in the version I present, transmigrated into fairer forms than I have found them occupy elsewhere. Here is a grand hymn for the whole world: Sing unto the Lord.
PSALM XCVI
Sing, and let your song be new,
Unto him that never endeth;
Sing all earth, and all in you—
Sing to God, and bless his name.
Of
Evil was pronounced almost as a monosyllable, and was at last contracted to ill.
"Come to find a place." The transitive verb stow means to put in a place: here it is used intransitively.
