XI

  O happy Thames, that didst my STELLA bear,
  I saw thyself, with many a smiling line
  Upon thy cheerful face, Joy’s livery wear,
  While those fair planets on thy streams did shine;
  The boat for joy could not to dance forbear,
  While wanton winds, with beauty so divine
  Ravish’d, stay’d not, till in her golden hair
  They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine. 
  And fain those AEol’s youth there would their stay
  Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly,
  First did with puffing kiss those locks display. 
  She, so dishevell’d, blush’d; from window I
  With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace,
  Let honour’s self to thee grant highest place!

  XII

  Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be;
  And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet,
  Tempers her words to trampling horses’ feet,
  More soft than to a chamber melody,—­
  Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me
  To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet,
  My Muse and I must you of duty greet
  With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 
  Be you still fair, honour’d by public heed,
  By no encroachment wrong’d, nor time forgot;
  Nor blam’d for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. 
  And that you know, I envy you no lot
  Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,
  Hundreds of years you STELLA’S feet may kiss.

[Footnote 1:  Press.]

Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are my favourites.  But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical.  The spirit of “learning and of chivalry,”—­of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the “president,”—­shines through them.  I confess I can see nothing of the “jejune” or “frigid” in them; much less of the “stiff” and “cumbrous”—­which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia.  The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly.  It might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to “trampling horses’ feet.”  They abound in felicitous phrases—­

  O heav’nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face—­

8th Sonnet.

  —­Sweet pillows, sweetest bed;
  A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;
  A rosy garland, and a weary head.

2nd Sonnet.

  —­That sweet enemy,—­France—­

5th Sonnet.

But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unlocalised feelings—­the failing too much of some poetry of the present day—­they are full, material, and circumstantiated.  Time and place appropriates every one of them.  It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendent passion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them.  An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them; marks the when and where they were written.