“You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead; and my counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess: let them go to the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and with a heart like yourself.
“I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not hide yourself many days; but, by your labors seek to help my miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it: for, know it, my dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own respect, despiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep), and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it in Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother.
“My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true God hold you both in his arms.”
It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Raleigh; the poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine; but they did have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought. They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till long after he had gone: they were only occasional pieces,[2] coming to the light fitfully under stress of mind—a trail of fire-sparks, as we may say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate fortunes.
Even his History was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent themselves in the blaze of battles—in breasting stormy seas that washed shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with every sunrise.
And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of the Orinoco, its lawless gallantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long captivities—it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns, and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full of the largest pathos.
When you read Charles Kingsley’s story of Westward, Ho! (which you surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has written relating to Raleigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the true Elizabethan humor—putting fiery love and life into his writing; the roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down, splashes of storm-driven brine.