In clearest skie, or where cloudes thickest be;
In lusty youth, or when my heeres are graye:
Set me in heaven, in earth, or els in hell,
In hyll or dale, or in the foming flood,
Thrall, or at large, alive whereso I dwell,
Sicke or in health, in evill fame or good:
Hers will I be, and onely with this thought
Content my self, although my chaunce be nought."
Of the sonnets of Watson, which were published about 1581, we have given an opinion, at some length, in the preceding chapter, and shall merely add here, that neither in their structure, nor in their diction or imagery, could they be, or were they, models for our author; and are indeed greatly inferior, not only to the sonnets of Shakspeare, but to those of almost every other poet of his day.
The sonnets of Sidney, which appeared in 1591 under the title of Astrophel and Stella, exhibit a variety of metrical arrangement; a few which rival, and several which nearly approach, the most strict Petrarcan form. The octant in Sidney is often perfectly correct, while the sextant presents us with the structure which, though not very common in Italian, has been, since his time, adopted more frequently than any other by our own poets; that is, where the first line and the third, the second and fourth, the fifth and sixth, rhime together; with this difference, however, that the moderns, in their division of the sextant, have more usually followed the example of Surrey just quoted, in forming their minor system of a quatrain and a couplet, while Sidney more correctly distributes it into terzette.