"Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my love good morrow!
Winds from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow."[4]
Pastoral Lyrics.—In Shakespeare's early youth it was the fashion to write lyrics about the delights of rustic life with sheep and shepherds. The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, had taught the English how to write pastoral verse. The entire joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in which shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified sheperdesses. A great poet named one of his productions, Shepherd's Calendar and Sir Philip Sidney wrote in poetic prose the pastoral romance Arcadia.
Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to his Love is a typical poetic expression of the fancied delight in pastoral life:—
"…we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
Miscellaneous Lyrics.—As the Elizabethan age progressed, the subject matter of the lyrics became broader. Verse showing consummate mastery of turns expressed the most varied emotions. Some of the greatest lyrics of the period are the songs interspersed in the plays of the dramatists, from Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of Shakespeare, the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of the best of these occur in his Cymbeline. One is the song—
"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
and the other is the dirge beginning:—
"Fear no more the heat o' the sun."
Ariel's songs in The Tempest fascinate with the witchery of untrammeled existence. Two lines of a song from Twelfth Night give an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the present as opposed to an elusive future:—
"What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter."