Farewell to you my hopes, my wonted waking dreams,
Farewell sometimes enjoyèd joy, eclipsèd are thy beams,
Farewell self-pleasing thoughts, which quietness brings forth,
And farewell friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth.

And farewell merry heart, the gift of guiltless minds,
And all sports, which for life's restore, variety assigns:
Let all that sweet is void; in me no mirth may dwell;
Philip the cause of all this woe, my life's content, farewell!

Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life yet knows not how to kill,
Go, seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,

Salute the stones that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind.

SIR EDWARD DYER.

[Born about 1550 at Sharpham near Glastonbury; educated at Balliol College, Oxford; ambassador to Denmark 1589; knighted 1596; died 1607.]

Sir Edward Dyer, 'for Elegy most sweete, solempne and of high conceit,' according to a contemporary judgment, makes the last in importance, though the first in date, of that trio of poet-friends celebrated in Sidney's well-known Pastoral:

'Join hearts and hands, so let it be:

Make but one mind in bodies three.'

Very little authentic verse of his is now extant, nor is it probable that he produced much. On the other hand he has been freely credited with verses that do not belong to him, especially with certain poems that are now known to be by Lodge. Mr. Grosart has collected twelve pieces which may be attributed to him with a fair amount of certainty. Of these 'A Fancy' is interesting as having provoked a much better poem on the same model by Lord Brooke, and a later imitation by Robert Southwell. It is however too rambling and unequal for quotation. Dyer is now remembered by one poem only, the well-known 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' which though fluent and spirited verse, probably owes most of its reputation to the happiness of its opening. The little poem 'To Phillis the Fair Shepherdess' is in the lighter, less hackneyed Elizabethan vein, and makes a welcome interlude among the 'woeful ballads' which immediately surround it in England's Helicon, where it first appeared. Still, when all is said, Dyer, a man of action and affairs rather than of letters, is chiefly interesting for his connection with Sidney and Greville; and that stiff pathetic engraving of Sidney's funeral, which represents him as pall-bearer side by side with Lord Brooke, throws a light upon his memory that none of his poems have power to shed.

The last two extracts given below are taken from a book of which an apparently unique copy (dated 1588) is preserved in the Bodleian Library, under the title of Sixe Idillia (from Theocritus). Mr. Collier attributes this book to Dyer, on the ground of the initials E. D. given on the back of the title-page. This is weak evidence, but the fluency and sweetness of the translations make us loth to reject it.

MARY A. WARD.

MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS.

My mind to me a kingdom is,

Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss

That earth affords or grows by kind: Though much I want which most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

No princely pomp, no wealthy store,
No force to win the victory,

No wily wit to salve a sore,

No shape to feed a loving eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall:
For why? My mind doth serve for all.

I see how plenty [surfeits] oft,
And hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those which are aloft

Mishap doth threaten most of all;
They get with toil, they keep with fear;
Such cares my mind could never bear.

Content to live, this is my stay;

I seek no more than may suffice;
I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look, what I lack my mind supplies:
Lo, thus I triumph like a king,
Content with that my mind doth bring.

Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more.

They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store;

They poor, I rich; they beg, I give ;

They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.

THE PRAYER OF THEOCRITUS FOR SYRACUSE.

(Idyll 16.)

O Jupiter, and thou Minerva fierce in fight,

And thou Proserpina, who with thy mother hast renown
By Lysimelia streams, in Ephyra that wealthy town,
Out of our island drive our enemies, our bitter fate,

Along the Sardine sea, that death of friends they may relate
Unto their children and their wives, and that the towns opprest
By enemies, of th' old inhabitants may be possest:
That they may till the fields, and sheep upon the downs may bleat
By thousands infinite and fat, and that the herd of neat
As to their stalls they go may press the lingering traveller.
Let grounds be broken up for seed, what time the grasshopper
Watching the shepherds by their flocks, in boughs close sing-
ing lies,

And let the spiders spread their slender webs in armories,
So that of war the very name may not be heard again.
But let the Poets strive, King Hiero's glory for to strain
Beyond the Scythian sea, and far beyond those places where
Semiramis did build those stately walls and rule did bear.
'Mongst whom I will be one: for many other men beside
Jove's daughters love, whose study still shall be both far and wide,
Sicilian Arethusa with the people to advance

And warlike Hiero. Ye Graces who keep resiance

In the Thessalian mount Orchomenus, to Thebes of old
So hateful, though of you beloved, to stay I will be bold
Where I am bid to come, and I with them will still remain,
That shall invite me to their house with all my Muses' train.
Nor you will I forsake: for what to men can lovely be
Without your company? The Graces always be with me.

HENRY CONSTABLE.

[Born about 1555: died before 1616. His Diana was first published in 1592. An edition by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt was published by Pickering in 1859.]

He

Almost nothing is known of the life of Henry Constable. belonged to a Yorkshire family; he was educated at Cambridge; he was acquainted with the Earl of Essex, with Anthony Bacon, with the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, with the Countess of Pembroke and Lady Rich. His sonnets to the soul of Sir Philip Sidney seem to prove that he was honoured with the friendship of the auther of the Defence of Poesie. As a Catholic and an honest man,' as he calls himself, Constable could not escape suspicion in the suspicious England of his time. He passed much of his life in exile, wandering in France, Scotland, Italy, and Poland, and was acquainted with prisons and courts.

In

The slight but graceful genius of Constable is best defined by some of the epithets which his contemporary critics employed. They spoke of his 'pure, quick, and high delivery of conceit.' Ben Jonson alludes to his 'ambrosiac muse.' His secular poems are Certaine sweete sonnets in the praise of his mistress, Diana,' conceived in the style of Ronsard and the Italians. The verses of his later days, when he had learned, as he says, 'to live alone with God,' are also sonnets in honour of the saints, and chiefly of Mary Magdalene. They are ingenious, and sometimes too cleverly confuse the passions of divine and earthly love. addition to the sonnets we have four pleasant lyrics which Constable contributed to England's Helicon. We select two of these pastorals, one being an idyllic dialogue between two shepherdesses; the other, 'The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis.' These things have at once the freshness of a young, and the trivial grace of a decadent literature, so curiously varied were the influences of the Renaissance in England. Shakespeare and Constable begin where Bion leaves off. Constable was neither more nor less than a fair example of a poet who followed rather than set the fashion. His sonnets were charged and overladen with ingenious conceits, but the freshness, the music, of his more free and flowing lyrics remain, and keep their charm.

A. LANG.