Affords a pretty poetical contest between Pleasure and Honour. It is found at the end of Hymen's Triumph: a pastoral tragicomedie, written by Daniel, and printed among his works, 4to. 1623.[1014] Daniel, who was a contemporary of Drayton's, and is said to have been poet laureat to Queen Elizabeth, was born in 1562, and died in 1619. Anne, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery (to whom Daniel had been tutor), has inserted a small portrait of him in a full-length picture of herself, preserved at Appleby Castle, in Cumberland.
This little poem is the rather selected for a specimen of Daniel's poetic powers, as it is omitted in the later edition of his works, 2 vols. 12mo. 1718.
[Samuel Daniel was born in Somersetshire, and educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He left college without a degree, "his geny being," according to Ant. à Wood, "more prone to easier and smoother subjects than in pecking and hewing at logic." He was tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, subsequently Countess of Pembroke, and afterwards groom of the privy chamber to Anne, queen of James I. Browne calls him in Britannia's Pastorals, "Wel-languaged Daniel," and the union of power of thought with sweetness and grace of expression exhibited by him is highly praised by Southey and Coleridge. He was free from indelicacy in his writings, and Fuller says of him that "he carried in his Christian and surname two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his raptures that he abhorred all profaneness.">[
Syren.
Come, worthy Greeke, Ulysses come,
Possesse these shores with me,
The windes and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toyle,5
That travaile in the deepe,
Enjoy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleepe.