The praises of the Lord in lively notes;
The whiles, with hollow throates,

The Choristers the joyous Antheme sing,

That al the woods may answere, and their eccho ring.

Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheekes,
And the pure snow, with goodly vermill stayne
Like crimsin dyde in grayne:

That even th' Angels, which continually
About the sacred Altare doe remaine,

Forget their service and about her fly,

Ofte peeping in her face, that seems more fayre,
The more they on it stare.

But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground,
Are governed with goodly modesty,

That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry,

Which may let in a little thought unsownd.

Why blush ye, love, to give to me your hand,

The pledge of all our band!

Sing, ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing,

That all the woods may answere, and your eccho ring.

Now al is done: bring home the bride againe ;

Bring home the triumph of our victory:

Bring home with you the glory of her gaine ;

With joyance bring her and with jollity.

Never had man more joyfull day then this,

Whom heaven would heape with blis,

Make feast therefore now all this live-long day;

This day for ever to me holy is.

Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,

Poure out to all that wull,

And sprinkle all the postes and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall.
Crowne ye God Bacchus with a coronall,

And Hymen also crowne with wreathes of vine;

And let the Graces daunce unto the rest,

For they can doo it best:

The whiles the maydens doe theyr carroll sing,

To which the woods shall answer, and theyr eccho ring.

Ring ye the bels, ye yong men of the towne,
And leave your wonted labors for this day:
This day is holy; doe ye write it downe,
That ye for ever it remember may.

This day the sunne is in his chiefest hight,
With Barnaby the bright,

From whence declining daily by degrees,
He somewhat loseth of his heat and light,
When once the Crab behind his back he sees.
But for this time it ill ordained was,
To chose the longest day in all the yeare,
And shortest night, when longest fitter weare:
Yet never day so long, but late would passe.
Ring ye the bels, to make it weare away,
And bonefiers make all day;

And daunce about them, and about them sing,
That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring.

Ah! when will this long weary day have end,
And lende me leave to come unto my love?
How slowly do the houres theyr numbers spend?
How slowly does sad Time his feathers move?
Hast thee, O fayrest Planet, to thy home,
Within the Westerne fome:

Thy tyred steedes long since have need of rest.
Long though it be, at last I see it gloome,
And the bright evening-star with golden creast
Appeare out of the East.

Fayre childe of beauty! glorious lampe of love!
That all the host of heaven in rankes doost lead,
And guydest lovers through the nights sad dread,
How chearefully thou lookest from above,
And seemst to laugh atweene thy twinkling light,
As joying in the sight

Of these glad many, which for joy doe sing,

That all the woods them answer, and their echo ring!

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And ye high heavens, the temple of the gods,
In which a thousand torches flaming bright
Doe burne, that to us wretched earthly clods
In dreadful darknesse lend desired light;
And all ye powers which in the same remayne,
More then we men can fayne !

Poure out your blessing on us plentiously,

And happy influence upon us raine,

That we may raise a large posterity,

Which from the earth, which they may long possesse
With lasting happinesse,

Up to your haughty pallaces may mount;
And, for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit,
May heavenly tabernacles there inherit,

Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.
So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this,
And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing :

The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring!

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

[PHILIP SIDNEY Was the eldest son of the well-known Sir Henry Sidney, President of Wales and Lord Deputy of Ireland under Elizabeth, and through his mother, Lady Mary Dudley, grandson of the Duke of Northumberland executed in 1553, and nephew of Lord Leicester. He was born at Penshurst Nov. 29, 1554; he entered Shrewsbury School Oct. 17, 1564, on the same day as his friend and biographer Fulke Greville, after wards Lord Brooke; and in 1568 he was sent to Christ Church, Oxford. From May 1572 to May 1575 Sidney was abroad, in France, Germany, and Italy; sheltered in Sir Francis Walsingham's house in Paris on the nigh of St. Bartholomew, and spending a considerable time at Frankfort with Hubert Languet the reformer, afterwards his constant correspondent. In 1575 he appeared at Elizabeth's Court, and took part in the Kenilworth progress. In 1577 he was sent as English ambassador to Rodolph II at Prague, returning the same year. He seems to have made acquaintance with Harvey and Spenser in 1578, and in 1580, while he was in retirement at Penshurst, after his letter of remonstrance to the Queen on the Anjou match, he and his sister, the well-known Countess of Pembroke, produced a joint poetical version of the Psalms, and the Arcadia was begun (published 1590). He returned to Court in the autumn of 1580, and the Astrophel and Stella sonnets (published 1591) probably date from the following year. The Apologie for Poetrie was written in or about 1581 (the first known edition is that of London 1595). Sidney was knighted in the same year. In 1583 he married Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and was for the second time a member of Parliament. In Nov. 1584 he was appointed governor of Flushing, and nearly two years later, on Sept. 22, 1586, received his fatal wound at the battle of Zutphen. A complete edition of Sidney's poems was published by the Rev. A. B. Grosart, London, 1877.]

The extraordinary effect produced by Sidney's personality upon English imagination has been in many respects very little weakened by time. His name is almost as suggestive now as it was to his own generation of a typical brilliancy and charm, clouded by premature death and scarcely to be matched again. This unique impression however with which the figure of 'Astrophel' is still charged, is to a large extent independent of the causes for it which influenced his contemporaries. We are for the most part moved by Sidney's life, by the romance of it or its political and historical interest. His youth, his love-story, his death,—these are what

affect us far more than his books; what he did and was, infinitely beyond what he wrote.

'Death, courage, honour, make thy soul to live;

Thy soul to live in heaven, thy name in tongues of men!' His own time approached him somewhat differently. Browne's praise of him, which puts the 'deep quintessence' of his wit in the forefront of his merits, before it turns to dwell upon his 'honour, virtue, valour, excellence,' represents the general Elizabethan feeling about him better than the fine lines from Constable just quoted. His literary influence, coming as he did in the early Elizabethan days, while his great rivals to be were still for the most part undiscovered, was no doubt heightened by his personal story, but was at bottom a distinct and independent force. So much is clear from that astonishing mass of elegiac prose and verse heaped upon his grave, in itself a phenomenon in English literary history; and as the Elizabethan time unfolds, the effect of Sidney's writing and of his special qualities of thought and style become more and more evident. Upon the generation which grew up after him, and during the first half of the seventeenth century, his influence remained undiminished. From Constable, Ben Jonson, Browne, Wither, Crashaw, Waller, out of a much wider circle, a string of passages could be quoted to prove the extraordinary spell of Sidney as a poet, above all as the poet of Stella, upon his successors. The mere name of Astrophel seems to have thrilled the literary circle around him, and that immediately following him, as no other name had power to thrill them. A reputation so romantic, and so dependent on the exceptional correspondence between Sidney's personality and powers and the young, quick-witted, passionate, Elizabethan spirit speaking through them, could scarcely hope to pass through Puritanism and the eighteenth century unchallenged. Milton's well-known protest against the use made by Charles I. on the scaffold of 'that vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia,' 'not to be read at any time without good caution,' is significant of decline in one direction, while in another we are brought up against some curious eighteenth-century judgments which show not only the complete distaste of a classical age for Sidney's literary performance, and the oblivion into which his best work had fallen, but even impatience of his romantic personal fame. When we come to enquire into the why and the wherefore of this astonishing effect upon his contemporaries,' writes Horace