SONNET PREFIXED TO SIDNEY'S APOLOGY FOR POETRY, 1595.

Give pardon, blessed soul! to my bold cries,
If they, importune, interrupt thy song,

Which now with joyful notes thou sing'st among
The angel-quiristers of th' heavenly skies.
Give pardon eke, sweet soul! to my slow cries,
That since I saw thee now it is so long;
And yet the tears that unto thee belong,
To thee as yet they did not sacrifice;
I did not know that thou wert dead before,
I did not feel the grief I did sustain ;
The greater stroke astonisheth the more,
Astonishment takes from us sense of pain:

I stood amaz'd when others' tears begun,
And now begin to weep when they have done.

THOMAS WATSON.

[THOMAS WATSON was born about 1557 in London; was educated at Oxford; became a student of law, and died in London, probably in 1592. His principal writings are-a translation into Latin of Sophocles' Antigone, 1581; The 'Ekатоμяabía, or Рassionate Centurie of Love, 1582; Amynta Gaudia (in Latin), 1585; Italian Madrigals Englished, 1590; The Teares of Fancy, or Love Disdained, posthumously printed in 1593. Many of his poems were printed in the Miscellanies of the time.]

Thomas Watson is one of the best of the Elizabethan 'amorettists,' or writers of wholly artificial love-poetry, and his Hecatompathia, which Mr. Arber's reprint has put within the reach of every one, may be taken as a type and summary of the whole class. It consists of a hundred so-called sonnets or 'passions,' each of three six-lined stanzas, and each headed with a prose introduction describing the purport and often the literary origin of the poem. A series so furnished tells its own story; and we do not require to go back to Watson's epistle To the frendly Reader to appreciate his 'trauaile in penning these louepassions,' or to learn that his 'paines in suffering them' were 'but supposed.'’ Watson, in fact, was a purely literary poet. At Oxford, says Antony Wood, he spent his time 'not in logic and philosophy, as he ought to have done, but in the smooth and pleasant studies of poetry and romance.' To these studies, however, his devotion was serious; for he mastered four languages, so that he writes as familiarly of Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius as of Ovid, of Petrarch and Ariosto as of Ronsard. He translated the Antigone into Latin, and it was one of his Latin poems that gave him the fancy name of Amyntas, under which the poets of the time ranked him with Colin Clout and with Astrophel. But the literature that he affected most was the love-poetry of the Italians— of Petrarch and his followers, of Seraphine and Fiorenzuola, and many others that are quite forgotten now. Sometimes translating,

sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes combining them, he tells the story of his imaginary love, its doubts and fears and hopes, its torments and disappointment and final death, in that melodious Elizabethan English which not even monotony and make-believe can wholly deprive of charm. But still, Watson and his kindred poets have little more than an historical interest. They are but the posthumous children of the Courts of Love; their occupation is to use the scholarship and the ingenuity of the Renascence to dress up the sentiment of the Middle Age-a sentiment no more real to them than it is to ourselves. They make no appeal to us; their note has nothing of the note of passion and of truth that rings in the verse of Sidney and of Shakespeare.

EDITOR.

FROM THE 'HECATOMPATHIA.'

PASSION II.

In this passion the Author describeth in how piteous a case the heart of a lover is, being (as he feigneth here) separated from his own body, and removed into a darksome and solitary wilderness of woes. The conveyance of his invention is plain and pleasant enough of itself, and therefore needeth the less annotation before it.

My heart is set him down twixt hope and fears
Upon the stony bank of high Desire,
To view his own made flood of blubbering tears,
Whose waves are bitter salt, and hot as fire:

There blows no blast of wind but ghostly groans
Nor waves make other noise than piteous moans.
As life were spent he waiteth Charon's boat,
And thinks he dwells on side of Stygian lake:
But black Despair sometimes with open throat,
Or spiteful Jealousy doth cause him quake,

With howling shrieks on him they call and cry
That he as yet shall neither live nor die :
Thus void of help he sits in heavy case,
And wanteth voice to make his just complaint.
No flower but Hyacinth in all the place,
No sun comes there, nor any heav'nly saint,
But only she, which in himself remains,
And joys her ease though he abound in pains.

PASSION XL.

The sense contained in this Sonnet will seem strange to such as never have acquainted themselves with Love and his Laws, because of the contraieties mentioned therein. But to such, as Love at any time hath had under his banner, all and every part of it will appear to be a familiar truth. It is almost word for word taken out of Petrarch (where he beginneth,

'Pace non truouo, e non ho da far guerra;

E temo, espero, etc.?')

Parte prima
Sonet. 105.

All, except three verses, which this Author hath necessarily added, for perfecting the number, which he hath determined to use in every one of these his passions.

I joy not peace, where yet no war is found;
I fear, and hope; I burn, yet freeze withal;

I mount to heav'n, yet lie but on the ground;
I compass nought, and yet I compass all :

I live her bond, which neither is my foe,

Nor friend; nor holds me fast, nor lets me go;
Love will not that I live, nor lets me die;
Nor locks me fast, nor suffers me to scape;
I want both eyes and tongue, yet see and cry;

I wish for death, yet after help I gape;

I hate myself, but love another wight;
And feed on grief, in lieu of sweet delight;
At selfsame time I both lament and joy;
I still am pleas'd, and yet displeased still;
Love sometimes seems a God, sometimes a Boy;
Sometimes I sink, sometimes I swim at will;

Twixt death and life, small difference I make ;
All this dear Dame befalls me for thy sake.