M INTRODUCTION. Y chief design in publishing this small volume is to do an act of justice to the memory of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose poetry has been unaccountably neglected by his biographers, though it is singularly well-fitted to illustrate his character, while it left a distinct mark on the literature of a most brilliant age. No attempt was made during his lifetime, or for long afterwards, to identify or gather up his scattered pieces. The most important of his poems, "Cynthia," has long been lost. The old editions of his "Remains" contain only three short poems. The first responsible editor of his minor writings could only extend the number to nine; and the collection admitted to the standard edition of his works is at once defective and redundant. It is many years since I called attention to this subject in a volume which was meant, in the first instance, to illustrate the poetry of Sir Henry Wotton and his friends. But as Raleigh's poems formed then a secondary object, my treatment of the question was, in many respects, imperfect; and Raleigh's later biographers and critics, however meritorious on many higher grounds, have continued to repeat the old mistakes, of treating as doubtful some of his best authenticated and most characteristic poems, while quoting as genuine, without a word of warning, the mere waifs and strays of Elizabethan literature, which a zealous collector had swept together under his name. One is unwilling to let a youthful work remain unfinished, or to feel that any labour has been wasted by being left incomplete. I thought it worth while, therefore, to devote a summer's vacation to the renewal of long-suspended researches among those printed and manuscript miscellanies of the Elizabethan period which are preserved in our great public libraries; and I have thus enabled myself to go over the subject afresh, and more completely, in the present volume, in which Raleigh takes the lead. The authentication of his poetry has been carefully revised and extended; and while I have excluded all the unauthenticated poems from that division of the volume which bears his name, I have been able to include many genuine pieces which had found no previous place among his writings. I hope it will be thought that the careful sifting to which his poems have been now subjected has caused them to bear a far more distinct witness to the features of his marked yet varied character. At all events it ought to have the effect of giving more point and decisiveness to arguments rested on internal evidence. In this respect, Raleigh's critics have scarcely been fortunate. Mr. Tytler, for instance, thought the lines on Gascoigne's Steel Glass" below his other pieces," and unlikely to have "flowed from the same sweet vein which produced the answer to Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd." But surely Raleigh's "vein" was far more frequently sententious than "sweet." Other writers have judged more correctly in accepting the lines as an excellent specimen of his balanced, "censure." grave, judicial "The style is his," says Mr. Kingsley; "solid, stately, epigrammatic." Again, Mr. Hallam said that "The Lie" (called also "The Soul's Errand") had been ascribed to Raleigh "without evidence, and, we may add, without probability." Perhaps the "probability" is more apparent now that conclusive "evidence" has been found. The poem seems to me to be a typical expression of Raleigh's character; his vigour, his scorn, his haughty directness. Assume it to have been written at some moment of disgust and disappointment, and it will be seen to breathe in every line the pride with which he was always ready to confront his adversaries; yet the despondency with which he cried out, even during his first short imprisonment, that now at last his heart was broken; spes et fortuna valete! "Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary of life than they are desirous I should perish." (Edwards, ii. 52; July, 1592.) As is often the case with men of high courage and really sanguine temperament, Raleigh's thoughts were perpetually saddened by the anticipation of the end. No small portion of his verses might have been written, as is actually said of several pieces, "the night before his death." Dismissing this tradition, except in the one case where it seems to be at once strong and probable, we shall find grounds for supposing that he marked each crisis of his history by writing some short poem, in which the vanity of life is proclaimed, under an aspect suited to his circumstances and age. His first slight check occurred in 1589, when he went to visit Spenser in Ireland; and more seriously a little later, when his secret marriage, or its discreditable preliminaries, sent him to the Tower. "The Lie," with its proud, indignant brevity, would then exactly express his angry temper. "The Pilgrimage" belongs more naturally to a time when he was smarting under the rudeness of the king's attorney at his trial in 1603. Viewed by the light of that unrighteous prosecution, the grotesque imagery which disturbs its solemn aspirations may remind us of the more galling of the annoyances from which he knew that death would set him free. The few lines, "Even such is time," mark the calm reality of the now certain doom; they express the thoughts appropriate for the night now known to be indeed the last, when no room remained for bitterness or anger, in the contemplation of immediate and inevitable death. The "Continuation of Cynthia" must have been written very early in his long imprisonment, which lasted from December 1603 to March 1616; and again in 1618 from August to October. The handwriting resembles that of some papers dated 1603; and the fragment could scarcely have found its way to Hatfield after the death of Robert, Earl of Salisbury, in 1612. The internal evidence points in the same direction. The whole poem is coloured by that ruling fiction of the Elizabethan court, which compelled loyalty to express itself in the language of a lover-like devotion. No doubt Raleigh preserved to his last hour an unshaken reverence for the memory of his royal mistress. That stately homage is a leading feature in all his writings; from the time when he made her the standard of virtue and beauty (p. 9), in whom was "virtue's perfect image cast" (p. 78), for whose "defence we labour all" (p. 6), to the time when he offered his touching petition to Queen Anne of Denmark just before his death (p. 53): "That I and mine may never mourn the miss The author of a well-known epigram caught the position exactly when he exclaimed, "O hadst thou served thy Heroine all thy days!" But it is not so easy to believe that he could have maintained, to any late period of his imprisonment under James, that conventional form of flattery, which had continued welcome to the queen to the last. The poem contains not the slightest recognition of those claims on the husband and the father which must have strengthened their hold on the heart of the captive, while his loyalty resumed its more natural and appropriate tenor. The despondency of his language will not suffice to prove a later date, because it was his usual tone |