This inauspicious union ended, as might have been expected, in misery and disgrace. Lady Rich bore her fate with extreme impatience. Her warm affections, her high spirit, and her strength of mind, so heroically displayed in behalf of her brother, served but to render her more poignantly sensible of the tyranny which had forced her into detested bonds. She could not forget,—perhaps never wished or sought to forget—that she had received the homage of the two most accomplished men of that time,—Sydney and Blount; "and not finding that satisfaction at home she ought to have received, she looked for it abroad where she ought not to find it."
Sydney describes a secret interview which took place between himself and Lady Rich shortly after her marriage. I should have observed, that Sydney designates himself all through his poems by the name of Astrophel.
In a grove, most rich of shade,
Where birds wanton music made,
May, then young, his pied weeds showing,
New perfumed with flowers fresh growing.
Astrophel, with Stella sweet,
Did for mutual comfort meet;
Both within themselves opprest,
But each in the other blest;
Him great harms had taught much care,
Her fair neck a foul yoke bear;
But her sight his cares did banish,
In his sight her yoke did vanish, &c.
He pleads the time, the place, the season, and their divided vows; and would have pressed his suit more warmly,
But her hand, his hands repelling,
Gave repulse—all grace excelling!
....*....*....*....*
Then she spake! her speech was such
As not ear, but heart did touch.
"Astrophel, (said she) my love,
Cease in these effects to prove!
Now be still!—yet still believe me,
Thy grief more than death would grieve me.
Trust me, while, I thus deny,
In myself the smart I try:
Tyrant honour doth thus use thee;
Stella's self might not refuse thee!
Therefore, dear! this no more move:
Lest, though I leave not thy love,
(Which too deep in me is framed!)
I should blush when thou art named!"
The sentiment he has made her express in the last line is beautiful, and too feminine and appropriate not to have been taken from nature; but, unhappily, it did not always govern her conduct. How far her coquetry proceeded we do not know. Sydney, about a year afterwards, married the daughter of Secretary Walsingham, and survived his marriage but a short time. This theme of song, this darling of fame, and ornament of his age, perished at the battle of Zutphen, in the very summer of his glorious youth. "He had trod," as the author of the Effigies Poeticæ so beautifully expresses it, "from his cradle to his grave, amid incense and flowers—and died in a dream of glory!"
His death was not only such as became the soldier and Christian;—the natural elegance and sensibility of his mind followed him even to the verge of the tomb: in his last moments, when the mortification had commenced, and all hope was over, he called for music into his chamber, and lay listening to it with tranquil pleasure. Sydney died in his thirty-fourth year.