1603. It comprises altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, CH. VIII. of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The twentyfirst and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Cynthia. Hannah, in his Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose, concludes, with some hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between 1603 and 1612, to a much earlier poem. He sees in it allusions to the death of the Queen, which would more or less fix the date. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in the Athenaeum, in January, 1886, has contested that hypothesis. He thinks, in the first place, that the twenty-one lines which precede, and the twenty-one which follow, the so-called twenty-first book, have no relation to the poem of Cynthia. The rest he holds to be not a continuation of Cynthia, but an integral portion of the original work. That work, as a whole, he has convinced himself, was produced during the author's transient disgrace, between August, 1589, and its end, which may be taken to have been not later than December in the same year. That no part of Cynthia, as we have it, was written later than 1603 scarcely admits of doubt. Ralegh would not have sat down in the reign of James to write love ditties to Elizabeth. His repinings and upbraidings are manifestly all pointed at a dead heart, not at a dead queen. Mr. Gosse is, however, more successful in his argument that the main Hatfield poem was written in the lifetime of Elizabeth, than in his attempt to date it in 1589. He assumes that the poem was a finished composition when Ralegh read from it to Spenser. It is not likely that it ever was finished. Spenser's allusions to it point to a conception fully formed, rather than to a work ready for publication. In the latter case it is improbable, to the verge of impossibility, that Ralegh should not have communicated it to his circle. An initial objection to the view that the twentyfirst book was penned in 1589 is its reference to the

Twelve years entire I wasted on this war,

CH. VIII. that war being his struggle for the affection of Elizabeth. This Mr. Gosse ingeniously, but not satisfactorily, appropriates as the main support of his chronology. In the Paunsford recognizance Ralegh is set down as of the Court in 1577. On no other evidence Mr. Gosse infers that he was laying siege to Elizabeth's heart before he went to Ireland. Thus the dozen years of the campaign would be conveniently over by the autumn of Date of the 1589. A simpler solution seems to be to assign the roughhewing of the entire project of Cynthia, and its partial accomplishment, to the term of Ralegh's short occultation in 1589. He might well have disclosed to Spenser his project, and read out passages. They would be melancholy for their sorrow's crown of sorrow, their recalling of former undimmed felicityOf all which past the sorrow only stays.

Poem.

They would exaggerate royal unkindness. They would hardly have descanted on the tenderness as absolutely extinct. Even before Spenser extolled the Cynthia in Colin Clout in 1591, the harshness was softened, and had melted back to the playing at love in which Elizabeth was wont to indulge with her courtiers. When he resumed the theme on his banishment from Court in 1592, he would feel that he had solid cause for lamentation. By 1594 his disgrace seemed definite; the royal kindness won by years of devotion

Twelve years of my most happy younger days

appeared to have been utterly killed; and he was preparing to
sail away into space. The twenty-first book might have been.
written at any time between 1592 and 1595, and its most
dismal groans be fairly explicable. Looking back to his
regrets in 1589 for an episode of neglect, he could wonder at
himself-

At middle day my sun seemed under land,
When any little cloud did it obscure.

Had Spenser seen the twenty-first book of Cynthia in 1591,
with its real or unreal blackness of despair, he would not have
spoken of Ralegh as basking in the renewed radiance of happy

prospects. So Cynthia, as far as it was ever composed, may be CH. VIII. considered one poem, to which the extant twenty-first book essentially belongs. There is not, therefore, necessarily any hope, or fear, that the whole exists, or ever existed, in a perfect shape. Ralegh would nurse the idea for all the years in which the Queen's withdrawal of the light of her countenance gave him comparative leisure. The twenty-first book itself would be written with the direct purpose of softening his mistress's obduracy. The explanation of its preservation among the Hatfield papers may be that, on the eve of his departure, forsaken, withered, hopeless, for Guiana, it was confided, in 1594 or 1595, to Cecil, then a good friend, for seasonable production to the Queen. Viewed as written either in 1589, or in the reign of James, much of the twenty-first book is without meaning. Its tone is plain and significant for the years 1592 to 1595. If traced to that period, it tells both of the bold coming adventure of 1595,

To kingdoms strange, to lands. far-off addressed, and of the irresistible power of 'her memory' in 1592

To call me back, to leave great honour's thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt;
To leave the purpose I so long had sought,
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.

Concurrent testimony in favour of a date for the book later
than 1589, though much prior to 1603, is afforded by the use
in it of the name Belphoebe :

A queen she was to me-no more Belphoebe;

A lion then-no more a milk-white dove;

A prisoner in her breast I could not be;
She did untie the gentle chains of love.

Belphoebe was a word coined apparently by Spenser. To the
poem of Cynthia Spenser had said he owed the idea of the name,
implying that it was of his coinage. It was fashioned, he stated,
' according to Ralegh's excellent conceit of Cynthia, Cynthia
and Phoebe being both names of Diana.' Ralegh, by the in-

Belphoebe.

CH. VIII. troduction of the name into his Cynthia, at once has dated the canto in which it occurs as not earlier than 1591, or, perhaps, than 1595, and indicated his desire to link his own verses to the eventful meeting

Ralegh's
Sonnet.

among the coolly shade

Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore.

Spenser referred again to the poem of Cynthia, and to Ralegh's poetic greatness, in the most beautiful of the sonnets offered to his several patrons at the end of his surpassing romance and allegory:

To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale,

Thy Sovereign Goddess's most dear delight,
Why do I send this rustic Madrigal,

That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite?

Thou only fit this argument to write,

In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bower,

And dainty Love learned sweetly to indite.

My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour,

To taste the streams that, like a golden shower,
Flow from the fruitful head of thy Love's praise;
Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre,

Whenso thee list thy lofty Muse to raise;

Yet, till that thou thy Poem wilt make known,

Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.

It was his return for tribute in kind. By the side of Ralegh's
sonnet its flattery hardly seems extravagant :-

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen,

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended; in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,

And cursed the access of that celestial thief.

Before this, or Spenser's eulogy on him, was printed, Ralegh CH. VIII. had acquired the reputation at Court of a poet. Puttenham, a critic of high repute, had, in The Art of English Poesy, printed in 1589, pronounced for ditty and amorous ode, Sir Walter Ralegh's vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.' By 'inso- Poetic Gifts. lent,' not 'condolent,' as Anthony Wood quotes, Puttenham meant original. His first public appearance as a poet was in 1576, when in grave and sounding lines he maintained Gascoigne's merits against envious detractors, as if with a presentiment of his own fate

His flow of inspiration never dried up till his head rolled in the dust. But the years between 1583 and 1593 seem, so far as dates, always in Ralegh's career distracting, can be fixed, to have been the period of his most copious poetic fruitfulness.

Throughout his life he won the belief of men of letters and refinement in his poetic power. Their admiration has never failed him in the centuries which have followed. He has not been as fortunate in gaining and keeping the ear of the reading public. For that a poet has not only to be born, but to be made. Ralegh had a poet's gifts. He had music in his soul. He chose to think for himself. He possessed the art of the grand style. The twenty-first book of the Cynthia errs in being overcharged with thought. It abounds in noble imagery. There is pathos as well as dignity. Its author, had he lived in the nineteenth century, in default of new worlds to explore, or Armadas to fight, might have written an In Memoriam. In previous English poetry no such dirge is to be found as his Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney. A couple of stanzas will indicate its solemn music :

There didst thou vanquish shame and tedious age,
Grief, sorrow, sickness, and base fortune's might;
Thy rising day saw never woeful night,

But passed with praise from off this worldly stage.