Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasure,
Youthful lordings, of delight;
Whilst occasion gives you seizure,

Feed your fancies and your sight;
After death, when you are gone,

Joy and pleasure is there none.

In this poem we note a kind of combination of ethical reflection on the pleasures of life and a somewhat defiant determination to make the most of them while they last, since death will soon bring them to an end. It is a kind of lyric very frequent in the golden age, when so many of the playwrights and poets of the time were men of flexible morality and devoted to the passing pleasures of the hour.

In Robert Greene's "A Mind Content" this contemplative feature is seen in its most attractive form:

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content,
The quiet mind is richer than a crown;

Sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent ;
The poor estate scorns fortune's angry frown.

Such sweet content, such minds, such sleep, such bliss,
Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss.

Of this same pensive order is Breton's "The Song of Care:"

Come, all the world, submit yourselves to Care,
And him acknowledge for your chiefest king.

In Greene's pathetic poem, "Miserrimus," we have an example of a large class of Elizabethan lyrics in which the poet pauses for a while, and when it is all too late, to lament the follies of the past and

warn his fellows against similar errors. They are a kind of a dirge forced out of the poet's contemplation of human life and the hopelessness of the outlook. Thus he begins:

Deceiving world, that with alluring toys

Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn,
And scornest now to lend thy fading joys

T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn;
How well are they who die ere they be born
And never see thy sleights, which few men shun
Till unawares they, helpless, are undone.

In the closing stanza he lamentingly writes:

O, that a year were granted me to live,
And for that year my former wits restored;
What rules of life, what counsel would I give,
How should my sin with sorrow be deplored!

So, Breton, in his poem "A Doleful Passion:"

O, tired heart, too full of sorrows

In nightlike days, despairing morrows,
How canst thou think, so deeply grieved,
To hope to live to be relieved?

In Greene's "The Shepherd's Wife Song" we have a beautiful lyric of the pastoral and pensive order. Wilbye's suggestive poem, "All in Naught," reads, in its second stanza:

There is a jewel which no Indian mines
Can buy, no chymic art can counterfeit ;
It makes men rich in greatest poverty;
Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold,
The homely whistle to sweet music's strain,
Seldom it comes, to few from heaven sent,
That much in little, all in naught-content.

This ardent longing among the writers of the

time for personal contentment amid the stress and sorrow of the world embodies itself with special fitness in the impassioned lines of lyric verse, so that, in one form or another, almost every poet of the era gave some expression thereto.

William Byrd, in his lines on "The Home of Content," gives partial answer to those who are seeking the source of this priceless boon:

In crystal towers and turrets richly set

With glittering gems that shine against the sun,

In regal rooms of jasper and of jet,

Content of mind not always likes to wun (dwell);
But oftentimes it pleaseth her to stay

In simple cotes inclosed with walls of clay.

Sir Henry Wotton, in his "Character of a Happy Life," goes farther still in solving the mystery, as he cheerily sings:

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;
Whose answer is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill;

Who God doth late and early pray,
More of his grace than gifts to lend;

And entertains the harmless day

With a well-chosen book or friend.

This man is free from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.

These are lines worthy of Charles Wesley or of Watts, in their devout and chastened spirit, as they also set the seal of high literary taste and training on their author. It is not a little saddening to turn

from such hearty and hopeful lines as these to Lord Bacon's plaintive poem, "The World," as he mournfully sings:

The world's a bubble, and the life of man

Less than a span.

Cursed from his cradle, and brought up to years

With cares and fears.

If we now pass from the province of general lyrics to sonnets in particular, we shall find the same reflective feature, what Professor Schelling has happily called "the intellectualized emotion" of the time. The age was naturally that of the English sonnet as based upon the Italian models introduced in the reign of Henry the Eighth. Hence the poets of the period entered this inviting field, while the fact that so many of their sonnets are of the more serious order is in keeping with the general literary movement. Such are Constable's Spiritual Sonnets to the Honor of God and His Saints, in which he is said to have been the first one to devote the sonnet to "divine uses." A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets by Barnes is such a collection. So, Breton's The Soul's Harmony, Donne's Holy Sonnets, the prevailing dominance of the emotion of love thus having been applied to the sphere of spiritual life. So pronounced was this tendency that a living American critic states "that Chapman's poem 'A Coronet for His Mistress Philosophy' is probably the earliest attempt to write a sonnet sequence neither devotional

nor amatory." To quote from these poems is almost invidious, so characteristic is the minor key of English song, the sounding of the note of human sin and sorrow and care and disappointed hope. If the lyric is the most personal type of verse, the reflective lyric is especially so, the poet as the interpreter of his own life never descending to deeper depths in his complex personality than when meditating on the great themes of duty and destiny with that "high seriousness" that becomes so impressive a topic. Hence the presence of the lyric in the latest as in the earliest era of a people's life, the contemplative lyric being most germane to the fullgrown age of national history. When such an order of lyric is strictly kept within its proper emotional area this side the purely didactic, then we have it in its highest form. It is the signal success of such intellectual poets as Milton and Wordsworth in retaining true poetic passion with marked mental ability that designates them at once as masters of this complex art. To make the lyric thoughtful without being didactic, and impassioned without being sentimental, is the ripest result of the poet's art. Space will not permit us to quote at length from these Elizabethan sonnets. The opening lines of a few of them may be cited, as Sidney's:

Come, Sleep. O Sleep; the certain kind of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low.