May likewise love thee for the same again;
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain:

So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

As further illustrating this special type of lyric we may cite the lines "After Long Storms :"

After long storms and tempests sad assay,
Which hardly I endured heretofore,
In dread of death and dangerous dismay,
With which my silly bark was tossèd sore;

I do at length descry the happy shore,

In which I hope ere long for to arrive,

Fair sail it seems from far and fraught with store
Of all that dear and dainty is alive,

Most happy he! that can at last achieve

The joyous safety of so sweet a rest,
Where least delight sufficeth to deprive,
Remembrance of all pains which him opprest,
All pains are nothing in respect to this,
All sorrows short that gain eternal bliss.

In such lines as these we have an example not only of genuine lyric verse of the reflective order, but Christian sentiments worthy of a Cowper, and revealing the better side of sixteenth-century life. If the dramatists of the time could produce plays of questionable morale, Spenser, in turn, could clearly prove that a poet need not prostitute his powers to the service of passion in order to describe human affection and the pleasures of social life. These "Amoretti "-little songs of love-served in Spenser's hands to set forth the sacredness of all

earthly affection and sanctify it in the eyes of all England.

It is a significant fact that, while England was indebted to Italy for the sonnet, Spenser began at once to modify the licentious constructions of southern Europe on behalf of virtue and womanhood and social order. Thus it is that in his idyllic poem, "Epithalamion," said to be "the noblest wedding hymn in the language," and celebrating his marriage to Elizabeth, the central character of his sonnets, we find the same notable departure from continental models, on behalf of home and purity and womanhood. It is the real "Canticles" of our earlier vernacular poetry. After setting forth in graceful and delicate manner the physical beauty of his bride, he passes on by quick transition to the description of her higher and nobler qualities of mind and heart:

But if ye saw that which no eyes can see,

The inward beauty of her lively spright (spirit),
Garnisht with heavenly gifts of high degree,

Much more, then, would ye wonder at that sight.
There dwells sweet love and constant chastity,
Unspotted faith and comely womanhood,
Regard of honor and mild modesty ;

There Virtue reigns as queen in royal throne,
And giveth laws alone,

The which the base affections do obey,

And yield their services unto her will;

No thought of thing uncomely ever may

Thereto approach, to tempt her mind to ill.

From first to last this lyric of wedded love reads as the Song of Solomon, and at once lifted the

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Elizabethan conception of bridal joy to the highest ethical level. So, in his celebrated spousal song, 'Prothalamion," the same high motives prevail, while it is stated by the poet himself that his two closing poems, "Heavenly Love" and "Heavenly Beauty," were composed "by way of retractation," lest, perchance, his published poems "of earthly or natural love and beauty might be an injury to the cause of good morals in England."

Such, in brief, is the general tone of the lyrics of Spenser, moral and meditative throughout, the heartfelt and thoughtful utterances of an author more intent on diffusing the truth than on writing acceptable verse. In fact, in all the extent of his poetry there is no substantive exception to this dominant note.

Spenser, as a man, was of this pensive type, made more and more so by the caprices of court favor and the consequent struggles of his literary life, and when he wrote he wrote largely from the standpoint of his own experience. It was thus that he loved to portray the valiant knight of his epic as the armed champion of truth and goodness, in his fight with pride and hypocrisy and error and lust, and it was under the veil of allegory that he delivered many a deadly thrust at a corrupt Church and a corrupt State.

Lowell and the other critics are right who insist in placing the name of Spenser in the list of English reformers, not preaching trenchant sermons,

as did Knox and Fox, nor writing a system of Christian philosophy, as did Bacon, but still in his own way, as a Protestant poet, doing a mighty work for England and the Christian world. It is this quality of Spenser's mind and poetic art that Milton emphasizes when he calls him "our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotis or Aquinas."

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CHAPTER III

The Lyrics of Shakespeare

TTENTION has already been directed to the richness of the Elizabethan age in its lyrical product. It possessed what Mr. Symonds has justly called "a copious and splendid lyric," favorably comparing, in this respect, as he argues, with the Victorian age of English verse. As a poetic type through which human feeling freely and fully expresses itself, it was eminently adapted to the golden age as an era of English vigor and vitality, the modern age of life and of man, of human hopes and sympathies and joys and sorrows.

Hence the leading poets of the time were quick to discern the meaning of the new epoch in which they lived, and Shakespeare, though standing at the center of the great dramatic movement of the century, and beyond all comparison its chief representative and exponent, failed not to enter this lyric province and enrich it by the entering. So vital and pronounced is his specifically dramatic verse that we are apt to forget or underrate the extent and quality of his lyrics, his entire non-dramatic work being of the lyric order, while the dramas themselves exhibit the frequent presence of this idyllic type. In "Venus and Adonis," "Lucrece," "A Lover's Complaint," and "The Passionate Pilgrim " we note by the titles themselves their distinctive lyr