Were you the earth, dear love, and I the skies,
My love should shine on you like to the sun,
And look upon you with ten thousand eyes,
Till heaven waxed blind, and till the world were done.
Wheresoe'er I am, below, or else above you,
Wheresoe'er you are, my heart shall truly love you.

Sylvester.

A HYMN IN PRAISE OF NEPTUNE.

Of Neptune's empire let us sing,
At whose command the waves obey;
To whom the rivers tribute pay,
Down the high mountains sliding;
To whom the scaly nation yields
Homage for the crystal fields
Wherein they dwell;

And every sea-god pays a gem
Yearly out of his wat'ry cell,
To deck great Neptune's diadem.
The Tritons dancing in a ring,
Before his palace gates do make
The water with their echoes quake,
Like the great thunder sounding :
The sea nymphs chant their accents shrill,
And the Syrens taught to kill

With their sweet voice,

Make every echoing rock reply,
Unto their gentle murmuring noise,
The praise of Neptune's empery.

OF CORINNA'S SINGING.

T. Campion.

When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear.

But when she doth of mourning speak,

E'en with her sighs the strings do break.

And as her lute doth live and die,
Led by her passions, so must I:
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring;
But if she do of sorrow speak,

E'en from my heart the strings do break.

T. Campion.

MADRIGAL.

(In praise of Two.)

Faustina hath the fairest face,
And Phillida the better grace;
Both have mine eye enriched :
This sings full sweetly with her voice;
Her fingers make so sweet a noise:
Both have mine ear bewitched.
Ah me! sith Fates have so provided,
My heart, alas! must be divided.

MADRIGAL.

My Love in her attire doth show her wit,

It doth as well become her;

For every season she hath dressings fit,

For winter, spring, and summer.

No beauty she doth miss

When all her robes are on;

But Beauty's self she is

When all her robes are gone.

GEORGE CHAPMAN.

[BORN, probably, at Hitchin (1557? 1559?). Was sent (1574?) to the University, but whether first to this of Oxon or to that of Cambridge is to me unknown' (Antony Wood). Published The Shadow of Night (1594), Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595), De Guianâ, Carmen Epicum (1596), Hero and Leander (1598), Seven Books of Homer's Iliad (1598), Achilles' Shield (1598), Euthymiae Raptus, or The Tears of Peace, with Interlocutions (1609), Homer's Tenth Book of his Iliads (16×9), Epicedium, or a Funeral Song, in memory of Henry, Prince of Wales (1612), Homer's Iliads in English (1611, 1612), First Twelve Books of the Odyssey (1614), Twenty-four Books of Homer's Odisses (1614, 1615), The Whole Works of Homer (1616), The Crowne of all Homer's Workes, Batrachomyomachia, &c. (1624?). Chapman was also author of many plays. Died May 12, 1634.]

In spite of the force and originality of English dramatic poetry in the age of Shakespeare, the poetical character of the time had much in common with the Alexandrian epoch in Greek literary history. At Alexandria, when the creative genius of Greece was almost spent, literature became pedantic and obscure. Poets desired to show their learning, their knowledge of the details of mythology, their acquaintance with the more fantastic theories of contemporary science. The same faults mark the poetry of the Elizabethan age, and few writers were more culpably Alexandrian than George Chapman. The spirit of Callimachus or of Lycophron seems at times to have come upon him, as the lutin was supposed to whisper ideas extraordinarily good or evil, to Corneille. When under the influence of this possession, Chapman displayed the very qualities and unconsciously translated the language of Callimachus. He vowed that he detested popularity, and all that can please the commune reader.' He inveighed against the 'invidious detractor' who became a spectre that dogged him in every enterprise. He hid his meaning in a mist of verbiage, within a labyrinth

of conceits, and himself said, only too truly, about the 'sweet Leander' of Marlowe,

"I in floods of ink

Must drown thy graces.'

It is scarcely necessary to justify these remarks by illustrations from Chapman's works. Every reader of the poems and the prefaces finds barbarism, churlish temper, and pedantry in profusion. In spite of unpopularity, Chapman 'rested as resolute as Seneca, satisfying himself if but a few, if one, or if none like' his

verses.

Why then is Chapman, as it were in his own despite, a poet still worthy of the regard of lovers of poetry? The answer is partly to be found in his courageous and ardent spirit, a spirit bitterly at odds with life, but still true to its own nobility, still capable, in happier moments, of divining life's real significance, and of asserting lofty truths in pregnant words. In his poems we find him moving from an exaggerated pessimism, a pessimism worthy of a Romanticist of 1830, to more dignified acquiescence in human destiny. The Shadow of Night, his earliest work, expresses, not without affectation and exaggeration, his blackest mood. Chaos seems better to him than creation, the undivided rest of the void is a happier thing than the crowded distractions of life. Night, which confuses all in shadow and rest, is his Goddess,

As for day,

That eagle-like doth with her starry wings,

Beat in the fowls and beasts to Somnus' lodgings,

And haughty Day to the infernal deep,

Proclaiming silence, study, ease, and sleep.'

In hell thus let her sit, and never rise,

Till morns leave blushing at her cruelties.'

In a work published almost immediately after The Shadow of Night, in Ovid's Banquet of Sense, Chapman 'consecrates his strange poems to those searching spirits whom learning hath made noble.' Nothing can well be more pedantic than the conception of the Banquet of Sense. Ovid watches Julia at her bath, and his gratification is described in a singular combination of poetical and psychological conceits. Yet in this poem, the redeeming qualities of Chapman and the soothing influence of

that anodyne which most availed him in his contest with life, are already evident. Learning is already beginning to soothe his spirit with its spell. To Learning, as we shall see, he ascribed all the excellences which a modern critic assigns to culture. Learning, in a wide and non-natural sense, is his stay, support, and comfort. In the Banquet of Sense, too, he shows that patriotic pride in England, that enjoyment of her beauty, which dignify the Carmen Epicum, de Guiana, and appear strangely enough in the sequel of Hero and Leander. There are exquisite lines in the Banquet of Sense, like these, for example, which suggest one of Giorgione's glowing figures :

But Chapman's interest in natural science breaks in unseasonably

'Betwixt mine eye and object, certain lines

Move in the figure of a pyramis,

Whose chapter in mine eyes gray apple shines,

The base within my sacred object is;'

-singular reflections of a lover by his lady's bower!

Chapman could not well have done a rasher thing than 'suppose himself executor to the unhappily deceased author of' Hero and Leander. A poet naturally didactic, Chapman dwelt on the impropriety of Leander's conduct, and confronted him with the indignant goddess of Ceremony. In a passage which ought to interest modern investigators of Ceremonial Government, the poet makes all the hearts of deities' hurry to Ceremony's feet :

'She led Religion, all her body was

Clear and transparent as the purest glass;
Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence,

Her shadows were; Society, Memory;

All which her sight made live, her absence die.'

The allegory is philosophical enough, but strangely out of place. The poem contains at least one image worthy of Marlowe

"His most kind sister all his secrets knew,

And to her, singing like a shower, he flew.'

This too, of Hero, might have been written by the master of

verse: