Rosaline.—Page [22].
This splendid poem (from the same romance), written on the poet’s voyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, has the fire and freshness of the south and the sea; all its colours are clear. The reader’s ear will at once teach him to read the sigh ‘heigh ho’ so as to give the first syllable the time of two (long and short).
Farewell to Arms.—Page [25].
George Peele’s four fine stanzas (which must be mentioned as dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, but are better without that dedication) exist in another form, in the first person, and with some archaisms smoothed. But the third person seems to be far more touching, the old man himself having done with verse.
The Passionate Shepherd.—Page [28].
The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.
Take, O take those Lips away.—Page [44].
The author of this exquisite song is by no means certain. The second stanza is not with the first in Shakespeare, but it is in Beaumont and Fletcher.
Kind are her Answers.—Page [46].
These verses are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himself sweetly commended as ‘voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit.’ In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and the trochaic movement of the short lines meet the contrary movement of the rest, with an exquisite effect of flux and reflux. The ‘dancers’ whose time they sang must have danced (with Perdita) like ‘a wave of the sea.’