These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which, of course, was not in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are hexameters. How delightfully they scan:—
'Wh¯at d˘o l˘ov | er¯s se¯ek | f¯or l¯ong | se¯ekin¯g | f¯or t˘o e˘n | j¯oy?
J¯oy.'
On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind in Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselves had used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of 'Phaleuciaks,' and then Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from saying something which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.' And they thought the night had passed quickly.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
An apology to Sidney.
This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?' but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the language of the Gods.'