Poet, _I take leave_.

The collection is a miscellaneous one, both as to subjects and date: it
contains among other things, the translations from Petrarch and Du
Bellay, which had appeared in Vander Noodt's _Theatre of Worldlings_, in
1569. But there are also some pieces of later date; and they disclose
not only personal sorrows and griefs, but also an experience which had
ended in disgust and disappointment. In spite of Ralegh's friendship, he
had found that in the Court he was not likely to thrive. The two
powerful men who had been his earliest friends had disappeared. Philip
Sidney had died in 1586; Leicester, soon after the destruction of the
Armada, in 1588. And they had been followed (April, 1590) by Sidney's
powerful father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. The death of Leicester,
untended, unlamented, powerfully impressed Spenser, always keenly alive
to the pathetic vicissitudes of human greatness. In one of these pieces,
_The Ruins of Time_, addressed to Sidney's sister, the Countess of
Pembroke, Spenser thus imagines the death of Leicester,--

It is not long, since these two eyes beheld
A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,
Whom England high in count of honour held,
And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace;
Of greatest ones he, greatest in his place,
Sate in the bosome of his Soveraine,
And _Right and loyall_ did his word maintaine.

I saw him die, I saw him die, as one
Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare;
I saw him die, and no man left to mone
His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare:
Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare;
Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie
The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie.

O! trustless state of miserable men,
That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing,
And vainlie thinke your selves halfe happie then,
When painted faces with smooth flattering
Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing;
And, when the courting masker louteth lowe,
Him true in heart and trustie to you trow.

For Sidney, the darling of the time, who had been to him not merely a
cordial friend, but the realized type of all that was glorious in
manhood, and beautiful in character and gifts, his mourning was more
than that of a looker-on at a moving instance of the frailty of
greatness. It was the poet's sorrow for the poet, who had almost been to
him what the elder brother is to the