To every one (so have ye faith) is given
A winged guardian from the ranks of heaven.
A greater, Leonora, visits thee:
Thy voice proclaims the present deity.
Either the present deity we hear,
Or he of the third heaven hath left his sphere,
And through the bosom's pure and warbling wells,
Breathes tenderly his smoothed oracles;
Breathes tenderly, and so with easy rounds
Teaches our mortal hearts to bear immortal sounds.
If God is all, and in all nature dwells,
In thee alone he speaks, mute ruler in all else.
The Latin in Masson's edition of Milton differs here and there from
Lamb's version.
Page 243. _Sonnet I_. Lamb cites the sonnets from _Astrophel and
Stella_, in his own order. That which he calls I. is XXXI.; II.,
XXXIX.; III., XXIII.; IV., XXVII.; V., XLI.; VI., LIII.; VII., LXIV.;
VIII., LXXIII.; IX., LXXIV.; X., LXXV.; XI., CIII.; XII., LXXXIV.
I have left the sonnets as Lamb copied them, but there are certain
differences noted in my large edition.
Page 247, middle. _Which I have ... heard objected_. A criticism of
Hazlitt's, in his sixth lecture on Elizabethan literature, delivered
in 1820 at the Surrey Institution, is here criticised. Hazlitt's
remarks on Sidney were uniformly slighting. "His sonnets inlaid in the
Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch'd and frigid.... [The _Arcadia_] is to
me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power
upon record.... [Sidney is] a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly
so;" and so forth. The lectures were published in 1821. Elsewhere,
however, Hazlitt found in Sidney much to praise.
Page 248, line 3. _Thin diet of dainty words_. To this sentence, in
the _London Magazine_, Lamb put the following footnote:--
"A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of
matter and circumstance, is I think one reason of the coldness
with which the public has received the poetry of a nobleman now
living; which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, is
entitled to something better than neglect. I will venture to copy
one of his Sonnets in this place, which for quiet sweetness, and
unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in our language.
"TO A BIRD THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN IN THE WINTER
"_By Lord Thurlow_
"O melancholy Bird, a winter's day,
Thou standest by the margin of the pool,
And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school
To Patience, which all evil can allay.
God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey;
And given thyself a lesson to the Fool
Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule,
And his unthinking course by thee to weigh.
There need not schools, nor the Professor's chair,
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart.
He who has not enough, for these, to spare
Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart,
And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair:
Nature is always wise in every part."
This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow
(1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney's muse, was a
special favourite with Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book,
and De Quincey has described, in his "London Reminiscences," how Lamb
used to read it aloud.
Page 248, line 27. _Epitaph made on him_. After these words, in the
_London Magazine_, came "by Lord Brooke." Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,
wrote Sidney's _Life_, published in 1652. After Sidney's death
appeared many elegies upon him, eight of which were printed at the end
of Spenser's _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_, in 1595. That which Lamb
quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18 and 26 and 27. The poem
beginning "Silence augmenteth grief" is attributed to Brooke, chiefly
on Lamb's authority, in Ward's _English Poets_. This is one stanza:--
He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind
A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,
Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ,
Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.
Sidney was only thirty-two at his death.
* * * * *
Page 249. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.
_Englishman's Magazine_, October, 1831, being the second paper under
the heading "Peter's Net," of which "Recollections of a Late Royal
Academician" was the first (see note, Vol. I.).