ay up
past treasures. So in Troilus, Act III, Scene 3, 'Time hath a wallet
at his back' &c. In the _Arcadia_, _chest_ is used to signify _tomb_.

5 7 A fine example of the high wrought and conventional Elizabethan
Pastoralism, which it would be unreasonable to criticize on the ground
of the unshepherdlike or unreal character of some images suggested.
Stanza 6 was perhaps inserted by Izaak Walton.

6 8 This beautiful lyric is one of several recovered from the very
rare Elizabethan Song-books, for the publication of which our thanks
are due to Mr. A. H. Bullen (1887, 1888).

8 12 One stanza has been here omitted, in accordance with the
principle noticed in the Preface. Similar omissions occur in a few
other poems. The more serious abbreviation by which it has been
attempted to bring Crashaw's 'Wishes' and Shelley's 'Euganean Hills,'
with one or two more, within the scheme of this selection, is
commended with much diffidence to the judgment of readers acquainted
with the original pieces.

9 13 Sidney's poetry is singularly unequal; his short life, his
frequent absorption in public employment, hindered doubtless the
development of his genius. His great contemporary fame, second only,
it appears, to Spenser's, has been hence obscured. At times he is
heavy and even prosaic; his simplicity is rude and bare; his verse
unmelodious. These, however, are the 'defects of his merits.' In a
certain depth and chivalry of feeling,--in the rare and noble quality
of disinterestedness (to put it in one word),--he has no superior,
hardly perhaps an equal, amongst our Poets; and after or beside
Shakespeare's Sonnets, his _Astrophel and Stella_, in the Editor's
judgment, offers the most intense and powerful picture of the passion
of love in the whole range of our poetry.--_Hundreds of years_: 'The
very rapture of love,' says Mr. Ruskin; 'A lover like this does not
believe his mistress can grow old or die.'

12 19 Readers who have visited Italy will be reminded of more than one
picture by this gorgeous Vision of Beauty, equally sublime and pure in
its Paradisaical naturalness. Lodge wrote it on a voyage to 'the
Islands of Terceras and the Canaries;' and he seems to have caught, in
those southern seas, no small portion of the qualities which marked
the almost contemporary Art of Venice,--the glory and the glow of
Veronese, Titian, or Tintoret.--From the same romance is No. 71: a
charming picture in the purest style of the later Italian Re