* Give me, next good, an understanding wife, They are most firmly good that best know why. A passive understanding to conceive, Books are a part of man's prerogative; * So fair at least let me imagine her ; That thought to me is truth. Opinion Cannot in matters of opinion err; WHEN forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter'd weed of small worth held ; Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,Where all the treasure of thy lusty daysTo say "within thine own deep sunken eyes," Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise; How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use, If thou couldst answer" This fair child of mine 1 Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse," Proving his beauty by succession thine: This were to be new-made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold. SONNET LIV. OH! how much more doth Beauty beauteous seem, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly, SONNET CXVI. LET me not to the marriage of true minds That looks on tempests and is never shaken; I never writ, nor no man ever loved. SONNET CXLV. THOSE lips, that Love's own hand did make, Was used in giving gentle doom; SIR WALTER RALEIGH. [Born, 1552. Died, 1618.] It is difficult exactly to estimate the poetical character of this great man, as many of the pieces that are ascribed to him have not been authenticated. Among these is the "Soul's Farewell," which possesses a fire of imagination that we would willingly ascribe to him; but his claim to it, as has been already mentioned, is exceedingly doubtful. The tradition of his having written it on the night before his execution, is highly interesting to the fancy, but, like many fine stories, it has the little defect of being untrue, as the poem was in existence more than twenty years before his death. It has accordingly been placed in this collection, with several other pieces to which his name has been conjecturally affixed, among the anonymous poetry of that period. Sir Walter was born at Hayes Farm, in Devonshire, and studied at Oxford. Leaving the university at seventeen, he fought for six years under the Protestant banners in France, and afterwards served a campaign in the Netherlands. He next distinguished himself in Ireland during the rebellion of 1580, under the lord deputy Lord Grey de Wilton, with whom his personal disputes eventually promoted his fortunes; for being heard in his own cause on returning to England, he won the favour of Elizabeth, who knighted him, and raised him to such honours as alarmed the jealousy of her favourite Leicester. In the mean time, as early as 1579, he had commenced his adventures with a view to colonize America-surveyed the territory now called Virginia, in 1584, and fitted out successive fleets in support of the infant colony. In the destruction of the Spanish armada, as well as in the expedition to Portugal in behalf of Don Antonio, he had his full share of action and glory; and though recalled, in 1592, from the appointment of general of the expedition against Panama, he must have made a princely fortune by the success of his fleet, which sailed upon that occasion, and returned with the richest prize that had ever been brought to England. The queen was about this period so indignant with him for an amour which he had with one of her maids of honour, that, though he married the lady (she was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton), her majesty committed him, with his fair partner, to the Tower. The queen forgave him, however, at last, and rewarded his services with a grant of the manor of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, where he built a magnificent seat. Raleigh's mind was not one that was destined to travel in the wheel-ruts of common prejudice. It was rumoured that he had carried the freedom of his philosophical speculation to an heretical height on many subjects; and his acceptance of the church lands of Sherborne, already mentioned, probably supplied additional motives to the clergy to swell the outcry against his principles. He was accused (by the jesuits) of atheism—a charge which his own writings sufficiently refute. Whatever were his opinions, the public saved him the trouble of explaining them; and the queen, taking it for granted that they must be bad, gave him an open, and, no doubt, edifying reprimand. To console himself under these circumstances, he projected the conquest of Guiana, sailed thither in 1595, and having captured the city of San Joseph, returned and published an account of his voyage. In the following year he acted gallantly under the Earl of Essex at Cadiz, as well as in what was called the "Island Voyage*." On the latter occasion he failed of complete success only through the jealousy of the favourite. His letter to Cecil, in which he exhorted that statesman to the destruction of Essex, forms but too sad and notorious a blot in our hero's memory; yet even that offence will not reconcile us to behold the successor of Elizabeth robbing Raleigh of his estate to bestow it on the minion Carr; and on the grounds of a plot in which his participation was never proved, condemning to fifteen years of imprisonment the man who had enlarged the empire of his country, and the boundaries of * A voyage that was aimed principally at the Spanish Plate fleets. human knowledge. James could estimate the wise, but shrunk from cordiality with the brave. He released Raleigh, from avaricious hopes about the mine of Guiana; and when disappointed in that object, sacrificed him to motives still baser than avarice. On the 29th of October, 1618, Raleigh perished on a scaffold, in Old Palaceyard, by a sentence originally iniquitous, and which his commission to Guiana had virtually revoked. THE SILENT LOVER. PASSIONS are liken'd best to floods and streams, Wrong not, sweet mistress of my heart, With thinking that he feels no smart Since if my plaints were not t' approve It comes not from defect of love, For not knowing that I sue to serve A saint of such perfection As all desire, but none deserve I rather chuse to want relief Silence in love betrays more woe Then wrong not, dearest to my heart, He smarteth most who hides his smart, And sues for no compassion *. Unborn was false Suspect ; At length men used charms, Thus women welcomed woe, Hey down a down, did Dian sing, A VISION UPON THE FAIRY QUEEN.' METHOUGHT I saw the grave where Laura lay, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; A NYMPH'S DISDAIN OF LOVE. HEY down a down, did Dian sing, Amongst her virgins sitting, Than love there is no vainer thing For maidens most unfitting: And so think I, with a down down derry. When women knew no woe, [This poem is attributed to Lord Pembroke,-but it has been ascribed with great probability to Sir Robert Ayton in a MS. and contemporary volume of Ayton's poems once in Mr. Heber's hands.] THE SHEPHERD'S DESCRIPTION OF LOVE. It is December match'd with May, JOSHUA SYLVESTER. [Born, 1563. Died, 1618.] WHO in his day obtained the epithet of the Silver-tongued, was a merchant adventurer, and died abroad at Middleburgh, in 1618. He was a candidate, in the year 1597, for the office of secretary to a trading company at Stade; on which occasion the Earl of Essex seems to have taken a friendly interest in his fortunes. Though esteemed by the court of England (on one occasion he signs himself the pensioner of Prince Henry *), he is said to have been driven from home by the enmity which his satires excited. This seems very extraordinary, as there is nothing in his vague and dull declamations against vice, that needed to have ruffled the most thin-skinned enemies so that his travels were probably made more from the hope of gain than the fear of persecution. He was an eminent linguist, and writes his dedications in several languages, but in his own he often fathoms the bathos, and brings up such lines as these to king James. So much, O king, thy sacred worth presume I on, James, the just heir of England's lawful union. His works are chiefly translations, including that of the Divine Weeks and Works of Du Bartas. His claim to the poem of the Soul's Errand, as been already mentioned, is to be entirely set aside. STANZAS FROM "ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS." TO RELIGION. RELIGION, O thou life of life, How worldlings, that profane thee rife, Under thy sacred name, all over, The proud their pride, the false their fraud, Ambition under thee aspires, And Avarice under thee desires; * [He had a yearly pension of twenty pounds from Prince Henry. Owen the Epigrammatist had the same sum: and Drayton had ten.] Sloth under thee her ease assumes, Religion, erst so venerable, What art thou now but made a fable, Not in the church with Simony, SAMUEL DANIEL. [Born, 1562. Died, Oct. 1619.] SAMUEL DANIEL was the son of a music-master, and was born at Taunton, in Somersetshire. He was patronised and probably maintained at Oxford, by the noble family of Pembroke. At the age of twenty-three he translated Paulus Jovius's Discourse of Rare Inventions. He was afterwards tutor to the accomplished and spirited Lady Anne Clifford, daughter to the Earl of Cumberland, who raised a monument to his memory, on which she recorded that she had been his pupil. At the death of Spenser he furnished, as a voluntary laureat, several masks and |