The more they on it stare—
But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground,
Are governèd with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound.
Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand?
The pledge of all our band?
Sing, ye Sweet Angels, Allelujah sing!
That all the woods may answer, and your echos ring!”
To my mind the gracious humanity—the exquisite naturalness of this is worth an ocean of cloying prettinesses about Gloriana and Britomart. Not very many years after this—just how many we cannot say—comes the great tragedy of his life: A new Irish rebellion (that of Tyrone) sends up its tide of fire and blood around his home of Kilcolman; his crops, his barns, his cattle, his poor babe[92]—the last born—all are smothered, and consumed away in that fiery wrack and ruin. He makes his way broken-hearted to London again; his old welcome as an adulator of the Queen is at an end; Raleigh is not actively helpful; Sidney is dead; he has some cheap lodging almost under the shadow of Westminster: He is sick, maimed in body and in soul; other accounts—not yet wholly discredited—represent him as miserably poor; bread, even, hard to come by; my Lord of Essex—a new patron—sends him a few guineas; and the poor poet murmurs—too late—too late!—and so he dies (1599). How glad we should have been to help him, had we been living in that time, and all this tale of suffering had been true;—so we think: and yet, ten to one we should have said—“Poor fellow, what a pity!”—and buttoned up our pockets, as we do now.