[112a] Cf. Ronsard’s Amours, livre iv. clxxviii.; Amours pour Astrée, vi. The latter opens:
Il ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes
Pour vous graver que celles de mon cœur
Où de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur,
Vous a gravée et vos grâces parfaites.
[112b] Cf. Spenser, lv.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, No. lxxvii.; Fulke Greville’s Cœlica, No. vii.
[113a] A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxiv. Ronsard’s Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. (‘Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core’) is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson’s Tears of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resemble Shakespeare’s pair); Drayton’s Idea, xxxiii.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, xx., and Constable’s Diana, vi. 7.
[113b] The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in Selecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love’s torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher’s Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet’s Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ‘she touched the water and it burnt with Love,’ but also
Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss
Which all diseases quickly can remove.
Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the ‘cool well’ into which Cupid’s torch had fallen ‘from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,’ but also that it grew ‘a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.’
[114a] In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar’s Olympic Odes, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk’s Poetæ Lyrici Græci. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, De Senectute, c. 207; in Horace’s Odes, iii. 30; in Virgil’s Georgics, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard’s Ode (livre i. No. vii.) ‘Au Seigneur Carnavalet,’ illustrate his habitual treatment of the theme:—
C’est un travail de bon-heur
Chanter les hommes louables,
Et leur bastir un honneur
Seul vainqueur des ans muables.
Le marbre ou l’airain vestu
D’un labeur vif par l’enclume
N’animent tant la vertu
Que les Muses par la plume. . .Les neuf divines pucelles
Gardent ta gloire chez elles;
Et mon luth, qu’ell’ont fait estre
De leurs secrets le grand prestre,
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne sçay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire eternel.(Œuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)
I quote two other instances from Ronsard on p. 116, note 1. Desportes was also prone to indulge in the same conceit; cf. his Cleonice, sonnet 62, which Daniel appropriated bodily in his Delia Sonnet xxvi.) Desportes warns his mistress that she will live in his verse like the phœnix in fire.