Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy. "Now farewell, mine own herdsman Wat !" And farewell Joseph with Thy round cap. Ut hoy!" For in his pipe he made so much joy. Now may I well both hop and sing, Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy. All these poems are English right through. After them a difference creeps in. In the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII England began to play her part in Europe; she was on the way to become a great Western power, and so was brought more and more into contact with the rest. Specially was she influenced in the sixteenth century by Italy and France. Not only Henry VIII and Francis I met on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but Englishmen began to mix with men of other nations in the Paradise fields of Poetry. Though love of England and of the homeland never dies, perhaps we never again find a lyric carolling of high things quite so debonairly as this shepherd, who though he talked of Bethlehem was native of the English Downs. 1 Called. As we pass on to the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, the lyrics are so abundant and so beautiful that no more than a scantiest gleaning can be packed into this book. A few love-songs, which surely cannot be surpassed by any others, shall come first. John Lyly may be unread nowadays, so far as his prose goes, but his sparkling little song, Cards and Kisseshalf jest, half earnest is not yet forgotten: Cupid and my Campaspe play'd He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows, Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how); O Love! has she done this for thee? Since Elizabeth's reign was one of great activity, of fresh enterprises in all sorts of directions, it is natural that our literature should, as it did, show to what heights it could rise. One of the earliest Elizabethan dramatists, who died so young, left behind him this love-lyric, simple and yet very hard to rival: Come live with me and be my Love, And we will sit upon the rocks, And I will make thee beds of roses A gown made of the finest wool A belt of straw and ivy-buds The shepherd swains shall dance and sing, The Passionate Shepherd was not the only lover whom Marlowe knew. In his tragedy, Dr. Faustus, a scholar who had sold his soul for knowledge, there is to be found one of the finest lyrical passages of love in English. By magic means, a vision had been brought before Faustus of that Helen of Troy, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, who was the most beautiful woman of her time. Having been persuaded by Paris, son of the King of Troy, to desert Menelaus for him, she became the cause of the Trojan War. As this vision of her appeared in the German scholar's study, he burst out, in Marlowe's play, into this song of wonder and admiration: Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air Then we turn to Shakespeare, and he brings us down from these giddy heights to the clean open country, for his plays are strewn with little jewels of song: When that I was and a little tiny boy; Where the bee sucks; Lawn as white as driven snow; Faery King, attend and mark; and all the rest. Who can say which of them all is the best? At any rate this is among the best: When daffodils begin to peer, The white sheet bleaching on the hedge, The lark, that tirra-lyra chants, With heigh, with heigh, the thrush, and the jay, So sang that snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," Autolycus, as he surely only irrelevantly remembered his aunts because he was hard pressed for a rime. The most lyrical stanza from The Passionate Pilgrim, full as it is of Shakespeare's bitter-sweet wisdom, must not be forgotten: 1 The quotation is from Marlowe's plays, in the Mermaid Series. Crabbèd age and youth cannot live together; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee; Age, I do defy thee: O sweet shepherd, hie thee Then Ben Jonson was not only a playwright, but a lyrist too. Rarely has the goddess of the chase been more worthily sung than in his song, To Diana : Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair Seated in thy silver chair, Earth, let not thy envious shade Lay thy bow of pearl apart And thy crystal-shining quiver; Space to breathe, how short soever: Love did not always run smoothly, however, even in the great Elizabethan days. This seems to have been the case with the nameless man who, somewhere about the year 1580, left behind him this song for his disdainful lady: Alas, my love, you do me wrong, |