A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G.D. was announced by no equivocal indications.  From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet, or historian—­of Grecian or of Roman lore—­to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast.  Him Markland expected—­him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter—­him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth[1], with newest airs prepared to greet ——­; and, patron of the gentle Christ’s boy,—­who should have been his patron through life—­the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable AEsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.

[Footnote 1:  Graium tantum vidit.]

SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY

Sydney’s Sonnets—­I speak of the best of them—­are among the very best of their sort.  They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure.  They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), “vain and amatorious” enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be “full of worth and wit.”  They savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman.  But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades.  When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney.  He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit.  His letter on the French match may testify, he could speak his mind freely to Princes.  The times did not call him to the scaffold.

The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years.  Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very hey-day of his blood.  They are stuck full of amorous fancies—­far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved.  We must be Lovers—­or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum praecordia frigus, must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our recollection that we were once so—­before we can duly appreciate