"The eternal wonder of our happy Isle."
And the river by which he sounds her name is the Avon—
"But Avon, poor in fame and poor in waters,
Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat."
The Wiltshire Avon is the proud brook that flows southward by Wilton, "where Delia hath her seat." If it may seem in any degree unfitting that Daniel should address language so glowing as is found in the Delia sonnets to a lady who is established as the head of a household with husband and sons about her, attention may be called to the fact that the sonnets, though they are characterised by warmth of feeling and extravagance of expression, do not contain one tainted line. Posterity must justify what Daniel in proud humility said of himself:
"I . . . . . . .
. . . never had my harmless pen at all
Distained with any loose immodesty,
But still have done the fairest offices
To virtue and the time."
The respectful dignity of Daniel's prose dedication of Delia to Mary Sidney cannot be surpassed; and the introductory sonnet that displaces it in the next edition, while confessing the ardent devotion of the writer, is yet couched in the most reverent terms. Daniel and other sonneteers had the great example of Petrarch in honouring a lady with admiration and love expressed in verses whose warmth might perhaps not have been so excusable, could the poet have been taken at his word. The new sonnets inserted in the editions of 1601 and 1623 show the faithfulness of the poet's homage. A loyal friendship, whether formed upon gratitude only or upon some warmer feeling, inspired the Delia although the poet expresses his devotion in the conventional modes. But that Daniel outgrew to some extent the taste for these fanciful devices is shown by the changes he made in successive editions. Four sonnets from the 1591 edition were never reprinted, another was reprinted once and afterwards omitted. In our text the order of the 1623 edition is followed, the edition that was supervised by the poet's brother; but these omitted sonnets will be found at the end under the head of Rejected Sonnets. It is certain that they are Daniel's and that he rejected them, and it therefore seems no more than fair to the poet, if they are reprinted at all, to insert them under this head.
While, then, these rejected sonnets may have been in two cases omitted by the poet because of their too great frankness of expression, in other cases, notably in the phoenix, the wax-image, the tablet-and-siren, the vanquished fort, and the ermelin sonnets, they seem to have lost their charm, not so much for any personal reason as for the artistic defect in the far-fetched nature of the device.
Daniel lived till 1619, experiencing the usual ups and downs in the career of a "Court-dear poet." In later years, the famous Lady Anne Clifford, wife of Mary Sidney's younger son, caused a monument to be erected in his honour, in the inscription upon which she recorded her pride in the fact that he had once been her tutor.