England's Antiphon

There may be an appearance of irreverence in the way in which he contrasts the bribeless Hall of Heaven with the proceedings at his own trial, where he was browbeaten, abused, and, from the very commencement, treated as a guilty man by Sir Edward Coke, the king's attorney. He even puns with the words angels and fees. Burning from a sense of injustice, however, and with the solemnity of death before him, he could not be guilty of conscious irreverence, at least. But there is another remark I have to make with regard to the matter, which will bear upon much of the literature of the time: even the great writers of that period had such a delight in words, and such a command over them, that like their skilful horsemen, who enjoyed making their steeds show off the fantastic paces they had taught them, they played with the words as they passed through their hands, tossing them about as a juggler might his balls. But even herein the true master of speech showed his masterdom: his play must not be by-play; it must contribute to the truth of the idea which was taking form in those words. We shall see this more plainly when we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly when he says:

  I saw in every stander-by  Pale death, life only in thy eye.

The following hymn is also attributed to Raleigh. If it has less brilliance of fancy, it has none of the faults of the preceding, and is far more artistic in construction and finish, notwithstanding a degree of irregularity.

  Rise, oh my soul, with thy desires to heaven;    And with divinest contemplation use  Thy time, where time's eternity is given;    And let vain thoughts no more thy thoughts abuse,      But down in darkness let them lie:      So live thy better, let thy worse thoughts die!  And thou, my soul, inspired with holy flame,    View and review, with most regardful eye,  That holy cross, whence thy salvation came,    On which thy Saviour and thy sin did die!      For in that sacred object is much pleasure,      And in that Saviour is my life, my treasure.  To thee, O Jesus, I direct my eyes;    To thee my hands, to thee my humble knees,  To thee my heart shall offer sacrifice;    To thee my thoughts, who my thoughts only sees—      To thee myself,—myself and all I give;      To thee I die; to thee I only live!

See what an effect of stately composure quiet artistic care produces, and how it leaves the ear of the mind in a satisfied peace!

There are a few fine lines in the poem. The last two lines of the first stanza are admirable; the last two of the second very weak. The last stanza is good throughout.

But it would be very unfair to judge Sir Walter by his verse. His prose is infinitely better, and equally displays the devout tendency of his mind—a tendency common to all the great men of that age. The worst I know of him is the selfishly prudent advice he left behind for his son. No doubt he had his faults, but we must not judge a man even by what he says in an over-anxiety for the prosperity of his child.

Another remarkable fact in the history of those great men is that they were all men of affairs. Raleigh was a soldier, a sailor, a discoverer, a politician, as well as an author. His friend Spenser was first secretary to Lord Grey when he was Governor of Ireland, and afterwards Sheriff of Cork. He has written a large treatise on the state of Ireland. But of all the men of the age no one was more variously gifted, or exercised those gifts in more differing directions, than the man who of them all was most in favour with queen, court, and people—Philip Sidney. I could write much to set forth the greatness, culture, balance, and scope of this wonderful man. Renowned over Europe for his person, for his dress, for his carriage, for his speech, for his skill in arms, for his horsemanship, for his soldiership, for his statesmanship, for his learning, he was beloved for his friendship, his generosity, his steadfastness, his simplicity, his conscientiousness, his religion. Amongst the lamentations over his death printed in Spenser's works, there is one poem by Matthew Roydon, a few verses of which I shall quote, being no vain eulogy. Describing his personal appearance, he says:

  A sweet, attractive kind of grace,    A full assurance given by looks,  Continual comfort in a face,    The lineaments of Gospel books!—      I trow, that countenance cannot lie      Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.  Was ever eye did see that face,    Was ever ear did hear that tongue,  Was ever mind did mind his grace    That ever thought the travel long?      But eyes and ears, and every thought,      Were with his sweet perfections caught.

His Arcadia is a book full of wisdom and beauty. None of his writings were printed in his lifetime; but the Arcadia was for many years after his death one of the most popular books in the country. His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh's, being less condensed and stately. It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his friend Spenser entertained when young; but there is often an exquisite art in his other poems.

The first I shall transcribe is a sonnet, to which the Latin words printed below it might be prefixed as a title: Splendidis longum valedico nugis.

A LONG FAREWELL TO GLITTERING TRIFLES

  Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust;    And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;  Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:    What ever fades but fading pleasure brings.  Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might    To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;  Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light    That doth both shine and give us sight to see.  Oh take fast hold; let that light be thy guide,    In this small course which birth draws out to death;  And think how evil63 becometh him to slide    Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.      Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see:      Eternal love, maintain thy life in me.

Before turning to the treasury of his noblest verse, I shall give six lines from a poem in the Arcadia—chiefly for the sake of instancing what great questions those mighty men delighted in:

  What essence destiny hath; if fortune be or no;  Whence our immortal souls to mortal earth do stow64:  What life it is, and how that all these lives do gather,  With outward maker's force, or like an inward father.  Such thoughts, me thought, I thought, and strained my single mind,  Then void of nearer cares, the depth of things to find.

Lord Bacon was not the only one, in such an age, to think upon the mighty relations of physics and metaphysics, or, as Sidney would say, "of naturall and supernaturall philosophic." For a man to do his best, he must be upheld, even in his speculations, by those around him.

In the specimen just given, we find that our religious poetry has gone down into the deeps. There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer. The alternative expressed in the middle couplet seems to me the most imperative of all questions—both for the individual and for the church: Is man fashioned by the hands of God, as a potter fashioneth his vessel; or do we indeed come forth from his heart? Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question aright possesses the key to all righteous questions.

Sir Philip and his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, made between them a metrical translation of the Psalms of David. It cannot be determined which are hers and which are his; but if I may conclude anything from a poem by the sister, to which I shall by and by refer, I take those I now give for the brother's work.

The souls of the following psalms have, in the version I present, transmigrated into fairer forms than I have found them occupy elsewhere. Here is a grand hymn for the whole world: Sing unto the Lord.

PSALM XCVI

  Sing, and let your song be new,    Unto him that never endeth;  Sing all earth, and all in you—  Sing to God, and bless his name.    Of the help, the health he sendeth,  Day by day new ditties frame.  Make each country know his worth:    Of his acts the wondered story  Paint unto each people forth.  For Jehovah great alone,    All the gods, for awe and glory,  Far above doth hold his throne.  For but idols, what are they    Whom besides mad earth adoreth?  He the skies in frame did lay.  Grace and honour are his guides;    Majesty his temple storeth;  Might in guard about him bides.  Kindreds come! Jehovah give—    O give Jehovah all together,  Force and fame whereso you live.  Give his name the glory fit:    Take your off'rings, get you thither,  Where he doth enshrined sit.  Go, adore him in the place    Where his pomp is most displayed.  Earth, O go with quaking pace,  Go proclaim Jehovah king:    Stayless world shall now be stayed;  Righteous doom his rule shall bring.  Starry roof and earthy floor,    Sea, and all thy wideness yieldeth,  Now rejoice, and leap, and roar.  Leafy infants of the wood,    Fields, and all that on you feedeth,  Dance, O dance, at such a good!  For Jehovah cometh, lo!    Lo to reign Jehovah cometh!  Under whom you all shall go.  He the world shall rightly guide—    Truly, as a king becometh,  For the people's weal provide.

Attempting to give an ascending scale of excellence—I do not mean in subject but in execution—I now turn to the national hymn, God is our Refuge.

PSALM XLIV

  God gives us strength, and keeps us sound—    A present help when dangers call;  Then fear not we, let quake the ground,    And into seas let mountains fall;    Yea so let seas withal  In watery hills arise,    As may the earthly hills appal  With dread and dashing cries.  For lo, a river, streaming joy,    With purling murmur safely slides,  That city washing from annoy,    In holy shrine where God resides.    God in her centre bides:  What can this city shake?    God early aids and ever guides:  Who can this city take?  When nations go against her bent,    And kings with siege her walls enround;  The void of air his voice doth rent,    Earth fails their feet with melting ground.    To strength and keep us sound,  The God of armies arms;    Our rock on Jacob's God we found,  Above the reach of harms.  O come with me, O come, and view    The trophies of Jehovah's hand!  What wrecks from him our foes pursue!    How clearly he hath purged our land!    By him wars silent stand:  He brake the archer's bow,    Made chariot's wheel a fiery brand,  And spear to shivers go.  Be still, saith he; know, God am I;    Know I will be with conquest crowned  Above all nations—raiséd high,    High raised above this earthly round.    To strength and keep us sound,  The God of armies arms;    Our rock on Jacob's God we found,  Above the reach of harms.

"The God of armies arms" is a grand line.

Now let us have a hymn of Nature—a far finer, I think, than either of the preceding: Praise waiteth for thee.

PSALM LXV

  Sion it is where thou art praiséd,    Sion, O God, where vows they pay thee:  There all men's prayers to thee raiséd,    Return possessed of what they pray thee.  There thou my sins, prevailing to my shame,  Dost turn to smoke of sacrificing flame.  Oh! he of bliss is not deceivéd, disappointed.    Whom chosen thou unto thee takest;  And whom into thy court receivéd,    Thou of thy checkrole65 number makest:  The dainty viands of thy sacred store  Shall feed him so he shall not hunger more.  From thence it is thy threat'ning thunder—    Lest we by wrong should be disgracéd—  Doth strike our foes with fear and wonder,    O thou on whom their hopes are placéd,  Whom either earth doth stedfastly sustain,  Or cradle rocks the restless wavy plain.  Thy virtue stays the mighty mountains, power.    Girded with power, with strength abounding.  The roaring dam of watery fountains the "dam of fountains"    Thy beck doth make surcease her sounding. [is the ocean.  When stormy uproars toss the people's brain,  That civil sea to calm thou bring'st again. political, as opposed                                                              [to natural.  Where earth doth end with endless ending,    All such as dwell, thy signs affright them;  And in thy praise their voices spending,    Both houses of the sun delight them–  Both whence he comes, when early he awakes,  And where he goes, when evening rest he takes.  Thy eye from heaven this land beholdeth,    Such fruitful dews down on it raining,  That storehouse-like her lap enfoldeth    Assuréd hope of ploughman's gaining:  Thy flowing streams her drought doth temper so,  That buried seed through yielding grave doth grow.  Drunk is each ridge of thy cup drinking;    Each clod relenteth at thy dressing; groweth soft.  Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking,    Fair spring sprouts forth, blest with thy blessing.  The fertile year is with thy bounty crowned;  And where thou go'st, thy goings fat the ground.  Plenty bedews the desert places;    A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth;  The fields with flocks have hid their faces;    A robe of corn the valleys clotheth.  Deserts, and hills, and fields, and valleys all,  Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call.

The first stanza seems to me very fine, especially the verse, "Return possessed of what they pray thee." The third stanza might have been written after the Spanish Philip's Armada, but both King David and Sir Philip Sidney were dead before God brake that archer's bow.66 The fourth line of the next stanza is a noteworthy instance of the sense gathering to itself the sound, and is in lovely contrast with the closing line of the same stanza.

One of the most remarkable specimens I know of the play with words of which I have already spoken as common even in the serious writings of this century, is to be found in the next line: "Where earth doth end with endless ending." David, regarding the world as a flat disc, speaks of the ends of the earth: Sidney, knowing it to be a globe, uses the word of the Psalmist, but re-moulds and changes the form of it, with a power fantastic, almost capricious in its wilfulness, yet causing it to express the fact with a marvel of precision. We see that the earth ends; we cannot reach the end we see; therefore the "earth doth end with endless ending." It is a case of that contradiction in the form of the words used, which brings out a truth in another plane as it were;—a paradox in words, not in meaning, for the words can bear no meaning but the one which reveals its own reality.

The following little psalm, The Lord reigneth, is a thunderous organ-blast of praise. The repetition of words in the beginning of the second stanza produces a remarkably fine effect.

PSALM XCIII

  Clothed with state, and girt with might,    Monarch-like Jehovah reigns;  He who earth's foundation pight— pitched.    Pight at first, and yet sustains;    He whose stable throne disdains  Motion's shock and age's flight;    He who endless one remains  One, the same, in changeless plight.  Rivers—yea, though rivers roar,    Roaring though sea-billows rise,  Vex the deep, and break the shore—    Stronger art thou, Lord of skies!    Firm and true thy promise lies  Now and still as heretofore:    Holy worship never dies  In thy house where we adore.

I close my selections from Sidney with one which I consider the best of all: it is the first half of Lord, thou hast searched me.

PSALM CXXXIX

  O Lord, in me there lieth nought    But to thy search revealed lies;          For when I sit          Thou markest it;    No less thou notest when I rise:  Yea, closest closet of my thought    Hath open windows to thine eyes.  Thou walkest with me when I walk    When to my bed for rest I go,          I find thee there,          And every where:    Not youngest thought in me doth grow,  No, not one word I cast to talk    But, yet unuttered, thou dost know.  If forth I march, thou goest before;    If back I turn, thou com'st behind:          So forth nor back          Thy guard I lack;    Nay, on me too thy hand I find.  Well I thy wisdom may adore,    But never reach with earthy mind.  To shun thy notice, leave thine eye,    O whither might I take my way?          To starry sphere?          Thy throne is there.    To dead men's undelightsome stay?  There is thy walk, and there to lie    Unknown, in vain I should assay.  O sun, whom light nor flight can match!    Suppose thy lightful flightful wings          Thou lend to me,          And I could flee    As far as thee the evening brings:  Ev'n led to west he would me catch,    Nor should I lurk with western things.  Do thou thy best, O secret night,    In sable veil to cover me:          Thy sable veil          Shall vainly fail:    With day unmasked my night shall be;  For night is day, and darkness light,    O father of all lights, to thee.

Note the most musical play with the words light and flight in the fifth stanza. There is hardly a line that is not delightful.

They were a wonderful family those Sidneys. Mary, for whom Philip wrote his chief work, thence called "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," was a woman of rare gifts. The chief poem known to be hers is called Our Saviour's Passion. It is full of the faults of the age. Sir Philip's sport with words is so graceful and ordered as to subserve the utterance of the thought: his sister's fanciful convolutions appear to be there for their own sake—certainly are there to the obscuration of the sense. The difficulty of the poem arises in part, I believe, from corruption, but chiefly from a certain fantastic way of dealing with thought as well as word of which I shall have occasion to say more when we descend a little further. It is, in the main, a lamentation over our Saviour's sufferings, in which the countess is largely guilty of the very feminine fault of seeking to convey the intensity of her emotions by forcing words, accumulating forms, and exaggerating descriptions. This may indeed convince as to the presence of feeling, but cannot communicate the feeling itself. The right word will at once generate a sympathy of which all agonies of utterance will only render the willing mind more and more incapable.

The poem is likewise very diffuse—again a common fault with women of power; for indeed the faculty of compressing thought into crystalline form is one of the rarest gifts of artistic genius. It consists of a hundred and ten stanzas, from which I shall gather and arrange a few.

    He placed all rest, and had no resting place;    He healed each pain, yet lived in sore distress;    Deserved all good, yet lived in great disgrace;    Gave all hearts joy, himself in heaviness;      Suffered them live, by whom himself was slain:      Lord, who can live to see such love again?    Whose mansion heaven, yet lay within a manger;    Who gave all food, yet sucked a virgin's breast;    Who could have killed, yet fled a threatening danger;    Who sought all quiet by his own unrest;      Who died for them that highly did offend him,      And lives for them that cannot comprehend him.    Who came no further than his Father sent him,    And did fulfil but what he did command him;    Who prayed for them that proudly did torment him    For telling truly of what they did demand him;      Who did all good that humbly did intreat him,      And bare their blows, that did unkindly beat him.    Had I but seen him as his servants did,    At sea, at land, in city, or in field,    Though in himself he had his glory hid,    That in his grace the light of glory held,      Then might my sorrow somewhat be appeaséd,      That once my soul had in his sight been pleaséd.    No! I have run the way of wickedness,    Forgetting what my faith should follow most;    I did not think upon thy holiness,    Nor by my sins what sweetness I have lost.      Oh sin! for sin hath compassed me about,      That, Lord, I know not where to find thee out.    Where he that sits on the supernal throne,    In majesty most glorious to behold,    And holds the sceptre of the world alone,    Hath not his garments of imbroidered gold,      But he is clothed with truth and righteousness,      Where angels all do sing with joyfulness,    Where heavenly love is cause of holy life,    And holy life increaseth heavenly love;    Where peace established without fear or strife,    Doth prove the blessing of the soul's behove;67      Where thirst nor hunger, grief nor sorrow dwelleth,      But peace in joy, and joy in peace excelleth.

Had all the poem been like these stanzas, I should not have spoken so strongly concerning its faults. There are a few more such in it. It closes with a very fantastic use of musical terms, following upon a curious category of the works of nature as praising God, to which I refer for the sake of one stanza, or rather of one line in the stanza:

  To see the greyhound course, the hound in chase,  Whilst little dormouse sleepeth out her eyne;  The lambs and rabbits sweetly run at base,68  Whilst highest trees the little squirrels climb,    The crawling worms out creeping in the showers,    And how the snails do climb the lofty towers.

What a love of animated nature there is in the lovely lady! I am all but confident, however, that second line came to her from watching her children asleep. She had one child at least: that William Herbert, who is generally, and with weight, believed the W.H. of Shakspere's Sonnets, a grander honour than the earldom of Pembroke, or even the having Philip Sidney to his uncle: I will not say grander than having Mary Sidney to his mother.

Let me now turn to Sidney's friend, Sir Fulk Grevill, Lord Brooke, who afterwards wrote his life, "as an intended preface" to all his "Monuments to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney," the said monuments being Lord Brooke's own poems.

My extract is from A Treatise of Religion, in which, if the reader do not find much of poetic form, he will find at least some grand spiritual philosophy, the stuff whereof all highest poetry is fashioned. It is one of the first poems in which the philosophy of religion, and not either its doctrine, feeling, or history, predominates. It is, as a whole, poor, chiefly from its being so loosely written. There are men, and men whose thoughts are of great worth, to whom it never seems to occur that they may utter very largely and convey very little; that what is clear to themselves is in their speech obscure as a late twilight. Their utterance is rarely articulate: their spiritual mouth talks with but half-movements of its lips; it does not model their thoughts into clear-cut shapes, such as the spiritual ear can distinguish as they enter it. Of such is Lord Brooke. These few stanzas, however, my readers will be glad to have:

  What is the chain which draws us back again,  And lifts man up unto his first creation?  Nothing in him his own heart can restrain;  His reason lives a captive to temptation;    Example is corrupt; precepts are mixed;    All fleshly knowledge frail, and never fixed.  It is a light, a gift, a grace inspired;  A spark of power, a goodness of the Good;  Desire in him, that never is desired;  An unity, where desolation stood;    In us, not of us, a Spirit not of earth,    Fashioning the mortal to immortal birth.* * * * *  Sense of this God, by fear, the sensual have,  Distresséd Nature crying unto Grace;  For sovereign reason then becomes a slave,  And yields to servile sense her sovereign place,    When more or other she affects to be    Than seat or shrine of this Eternity.  Yea, Prince of Earth let Man assume to be,  Nay more—of Man let Man himself be God,  Yet without God, a slave of slaves is he;  To others, wonder; to himself, a rod;    Restless despair, desire, and desolation;    The more secure, the more abomination.  Then by affecting power, we cannot know him.  By knowing all things else, we know him less.  Nature contains him not. Art cannot show him.  Opinions idols, and not God, express.    Without, in power, we see him everywhere;    Within, we rest not, till we find him there.  Then seek we must; that course is natural—  For ownéd souls to find their owner out.  Our free remorses when our natures fall—  When we do well, our hearts made free from doubt—    Prove service due to one Omnipotence,    And Nature of religion to have sense.  Questions again, which in our hearts arise—  Since loving knowledge, not humility—  Though they be curious, godless, and unwise,  Yet prove our nature feels a Deity;    For if these strifes rose out of other grounds,    Man were to God as deafness is to sounds.* * * * *  Yet in this strife, this natural remorse,  If we could bend the force of power and wit  To work upon the heart, and make divorce  There from the evil which preventeth it,    In judgment of the truth we should not doubt    Good life would find a good religion out.

If a fair proportion of it were equal to this, the poem would be a fine one, not for its poetry, but for its spiritual metaphysics. I think the fourth and fifth of the stanzas I have given, profound in truth, and excellent in utterance. They are worth pondering.