England's Antiphon

There may be an appearance of irreverence in the way in which he contrasts the bribeless Hall of Heaven with the proceedings at his own trial, where he was browbeaten, abused, and, from the very commencement, treated as a guilty man by Sir Edward Coke, the king's attorney. He even puns with the words angels and fees. Burning from a sense of injustice, however, and with the solemnity of death before him, he could not be guilty of conscious irreverence, at least. But there is another remark I have to make with regard to the matter, which will bear upon much of the literature of the time: even the great writers of that period had such a delight in words, and such a command over them, that like their skilful horsemen, who enjoyed making their steeds show off the fantastic paces they had taught them, they played with the words as they passed through their hands, tossing them about as a juggler might his balls. But even herein the true master of speech showed his masterdom: his play must not be by-play; it must contribute to the truth of the idea which was taking form in those words. We shall see this more plainly when we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly when he says:

  I saw in every stander-by  Pale death, life only in thy eye.

The following hymn is also attributed to Raleigh. If it has less brilliance of fancy, it has none of the faults of the preceding, and is far more artistic in construction and finish, notwithstanding a degree of irregularity.

  Rise, oh my soul, with thy desires to heaven;    And with divinest contemplation use  Thy time, where time's eternity is given;    And let vain thoughts no more thy thoughts abuse,      But down in darkness let them lie:      So live thy better, let thy worse thoughts die!  And thou, my soul, inspired with holy flame,    View and review, with most regardful eye,  That 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 the help, the health he sendeth,  Day by day new ditties frame.  Make each country know his worth:    Of his acts the wondered story  Paint unto each people forth.  For Jehovah great alone,    All the gods, for awe and glory,  Far above doth hold his throne.  For but idols, what are they    Whom besides mad earth adoreth?  He the skies in frame did lay.  Grace and honour are his guides;    Majesty his temple storeth;  Might in guard about him bides.  Kindreds come! Jehovah give—    O give Jehovah all together,  Force and fame whereso you live.  Give his name the glory fit:    Take your off'rings, get you thither,  Where he doth enshrined sit.  Go, adore him in the place    Where his pomp is most displayed.  Earth, O go with quaking pace,  Go proclaim Jehovah king:    Stayless world shall now be stayed;  Righteous doom his rule shall bring.  Starry roof and earthy floor,    Sea, and all thy wideness yieldeth,  Now rejoice, and leap, and roar.  Leafy infants of the wood,    Fields, and all that on you feedeth,  Dance, O dance, at such a good!  For Jehovah cometh, lo!    Lo to reign Jehovah cometh!  Under whom you all shall go.  He the world shall rightly guide—    Truly, as a king becometh,  For the people's weal provide.

Attempting to give an ascending scale of excellence—I do not mean in subject but in execution—I now turn to the national hymn, God is our Refuge.

PSALM XLIV

  God gives us strength, and keeps us sound—    A present help when dangers call;  Then fear not we, let quake the ground,    And into seas let mountains fall;    Yea so let seas withal  In watery hills arise,    As may the earthly hills appal  With dread and dashing cries.  For lo, a river, streaming joy,    With purling murmur safely slides,  That city washing from annoy,    In holy shrine where God resides.    God in her centre bides:  What can this city shake?    God early aids and ever guides:  Who can this city take?  When nations go against her bent,    And kings with siege her walls enround;  The void of air his voice doth rent,    Earth fails their feet with melting ground.    To strength and keep us sound,  The God of armies arms;    Our rock on Jacob's God we found,  Above the reach of harms.  O come with me, O come, and view    The trophies of Jehovah's hand!  What wrecks from him our foes pursue!    How clearly he hath purged our land!    By him wars silent stand:  He brake the archer's bow,    Made chariot's wheel a fiery brand,  And spear to shivers go.  Be still, saith he; know, God am I;    Know I will be with conquest crowned  Above all nations—raiséd high,    High raised above this earthly round.    To strength and keep us sound,  The God of armies arms;    Our rock on Jacob's God we found,  Above the reach of harms.

"The God of armies arms" is a grand line.

Now let us have a hymn of Nature—a far finer, I think, than either of the preceding: Praise waiteth for thee.

PSALM LXV

  Sion it is where thou art praiséd,    Sion, O God, where vows they pay thee:  There all men's prayers to thee raiséd,    Return possessed of what they pray thee.  There thou my sins, prevailing to my shame,  Dost turn to smoke of sacrificing flame.  Oh! he of bliss is not deceivéd, disappointed.    Whom chosen thou unto thee takest;  And whom into thy court receivéd,    Thou of thy checkrole65 number makest:  The dainty viands of thy sacred store  Shall feed him so he shall not hunger more.  From thence it is thy threat'ning thunder—    Lest we by wrong should be disgracéd—  Doth strike our foes with fear and wonder,    O thou on whom their hopes are placéd,  Whom either earth doth stedfastly sustain,  Or cradle rocks the restless wavy plain.  Thy virtue stays the mighty mountains, power.    Girded with power, with strength abounding.  The roaring dam of watery fountains the "dam of fountains"    Thy beck doth make surcease her sounding. [is the ocean.  When stormy uproars toss the people's brain,  That civil sea to calm thou bring'st again. political, as opposed                                                              [to natural.  Where earth doth end with endless ending,    All such as dwell, thy signs affright them;  And in thy praise their voices spending,    Both houses of the sun delight them–  Both whence he comes, when early he awakes,  And where he goes, when evening rest he takes.  Thy eye from heaven this land beholdeth,    Such fruitful dews down on it raining,  That storehouse-like her lap enfoldeth    Assuréd hope of ploughman's gaining:  Thy flowing streams her drought doth temper so,  That buried seed through yielding grave doth grow.  Drunk is each ridge of thy cup drinking;    Each clod relenteth at thy dressing; groweth soft.  Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking,    Fair spring sprouts forth, blest with thy blessing.  The fertile year is with thy bounty crowned;  And where thou go'st, thy goings fat the ground.  Plenty bedews the desert places;    A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth;  The fields with flocks have hid their faces;    A robe of corn the valleys clotheth.  Deserts, and hills, and fields, and valleys all,  Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call.

The first stanza seems to me very fine, especially the verse, "Return possessed of what they pray thee." The third stanza might have been written after the Spanish Philip's Armada, but both King David and Sir Philip Sidney were dead before God brake that archer's bow.66 The fourth line of the next stanza is a noteworthy instance of the sense gathering to itself the sound, and is in lovely contrast with the closing line of the same stanza.

One of the most remarkable specimens I know of the play with words of which I have already spoken as common even in the serious writings of this century, is to be found in the next line: "Where earth doth end with endless ending." David, regarding the world as a flat disc, speaks of the ends of the earth: Sidney, knowing it to be a globe, uses the word of the Psalmist, but re-moulds and changes the form of it, with a power fantastic, almost capricious in its wilfulness, yet causing it to express the fact with a marvel of precision. We see that the earth ends; we cannot reach the end we see; therefore the "earth doth end with endless ending." It is a case of that contradiction in the form of the words used, which brings out a truth in another plane as it were;—a paradox in words, not in meaning, for the words can bear no meaning but the one which reveals its own reality.

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1

The rhymes of the first and second and of the fourth and fifth lines throughout the stanzas, are all, I think, what the French call feminine rhymes, as in the words "sleeping," "weeping." This I think it better not to attempt retaining, because the final unaccented syllable is generally one of those e's which, having first become mute, have since been dropped from our spelling altogether.

2

For the grammatical interpretation of this line, I am indebted to Mr. Richard Morris. Shall is here used, as it often is, in the sense of must, and rede is a noun; the paraphrase of the whole being, "Son, what must be to me for counsel?" "What counsel must I follow?"

3

"Do not blame me, it is my nature."

4

Mon is used for man or woman: human being. It is so used in Lancashire still: they say mon to a woman.

5

"They weep quietly and becomingly." I think there must be in this word something of the sense of gently,-uncomplainingly.

6

"And are shrunken (clung with fear) like the clay." So here is the same as as. For this interpretation I am indebted to Mr. Morris.

7

"It is no wonder though it pleases me very ill."

8

I think the poet, wisely anxious to keep his last line just what it is, was perplexed for a rhyme, and fell on the odd device of saying, for "both day and night," "both day and the other."

9

"All as if it were not never, I wis."

10

"So that many men say—True it is, all goeth but God's will."

11

I conjecture "All that grain (me) groweth green."

12

Not is a contraction for ne wat, know not. "For I know not whither I must go, nor how long here I dwell." I think y is omitted by mistake before duelle.

13

This is very poor compared with the original.

14

I owe almost all my information on the history of these plays to Mr.Collier's well-known work on English Dramatic Poetry.

15

Able to suffer, deserving, subject to, obnoxious to, liable to death and vengeance.

16

The word harry is still used in Scotland, but only in regard to a bird's nest.

17

Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best.

18

Complexion.

19

Ruddiness—complexion.

20

Twig.

21

Life (?).—I think she should be he.

22

Field.

23

"Carry you beyond this region."

24

For the knowledge of this poem I am indebted to the Early English Text Society, now printing so many valuable manuscripts.

25

The for here is only an intensive.

26

Pref is proof. Put in pref seems to stand for something more than being tested. Might it not mean proved to be a pearl of price?

27

A word acknowledged to be obscure. Mr. Morris suggests on the left hand, as unbelieved.

28

"Except that which his sole wit may judge."

29

"Be equal to thy possessions:" "fit thy desires to thy means."

30

"Ambition has uncertainty." We use the word ticklish still.

31

"Is mingled everywhere."

32

To relish, to like. "Desire no more than is fitting for thee."

33

For.

34

"Let thy spiritual and not thine animal nature guide thee."

35

"And I dare not falsely judge the reverse."

36

A poem so like this that it may have been written immediately after reading it, is attributed to Robert Henryson, the Scotch poet. It has the same refrain to every verse as Lydgate's.

37

"Mourning for mishaps that I had caught made me almost mad."

38

"Led me all one:" "brought me back to peace, unity, harmony." (?)

39

"That I read on (it)."

40

Of in the original, as in the title.

41

Does this mean by contemplation on it?

42

"I paid good attention to it."

43

"Greeted thee"—in the very affliction.

44

"For Christ's love let us do the same."

45

"Whatever grief or woe enslaves thee." But thrall is a blunder, for the word ought to have rhymed with make.

46

"The precious leader that shall judge us."

47

"When thou art in sorry plight, think of this."

48

"And death, beyond renewal, lay hold upon their life."

49

Sending, message: "whatever varying decree God sends thee."

50

"Receives his message;" "accepts his will."

51

Recently published by the Early English Text Society. S.L. IV.

52

"Child born of a bright lady." Bird, berd, brid, burd, means lady originally: thence comes our bride.

53

In Chalmers' English Poets, from which I quote, it is selly-worme; but I think this must be a mistake. Silly would here mean weak.

54

The first poem he wrote, a very fine one, The Shepheard's Calender, is so full of old and provincial words, that the educated people of his own time required a glossary to assist them in the reading of it.

55

Eyas is a young hawk, whose wings are not fully fledged.

56

"What less than that is fitting?"

57

For, even in Collier's edition, but certainly a blunder.

58

Was, in the editions; clearly wrong.

59

"Of the same mould and hand as we."

60

There was no contempt in the use of this word then.

61

Simple-hearted, therefore blessed; like the German selig.

62

A shell plentiful on the coast of Palestine, and worn by pilgrims to show that they had visited that country.

63

Evil was pronounced almost as a monosyllable, and was at last contracted to ill.

64

"Come to find a place." The transitive verb stow means to put in a place: here it is used intransitively.

65

The list of servants then kept in large houses, the number of such being far greater than it is now.

66

There has been some blundering in the transcription of the last two lines of this stanza. In the former of the two I have substituted doth for dost, evidently wrong. In the latter, the word cradle is doubtful. I suggest cradled, but am not satisfied with it. The meaning is, however, plain enough.