any,--
And played thereon (for well that skill he conned),
Himself as skilful in that art as any.

Among the other poems thus read by Raleigh to Spenser at Kilcolman was
the 'lamentable lay' to which reference had just been made--the piece in
praise of Elizabeth which bore the name of _Cynthia_. In Spenser's
pastoral, the speaker is persuaded by Thestylis (Lodovick Bryskett) to
explain what ditty that was that the Shepherd of the Ocean sang, and he
explains very distinctly, but in terms which are scarcely critical, that
Raleigh's poem was written in love and praise, but also in pathetic
complaint, of Elizabeth, that

great Shepherdess, that Cynthia hight,
His Liege, his Lady, and his life's Regent.

This is most valuable evidence of the existence in 1589 of a poem or
series of poems by Sir Walter Raleigh, set by Spenser on a level with
the best work of the age in verse. This poem was, until quite lately,
supposed to have vanished entirely and beyond all hope of recovery.
Until now, no one seems to have been aware that we hold in our hands a
fragment of Raleigh's _magnum opus_ of 1589 quite considerable enough to
give us an idea of the extent and character of the rest.[4]

In 1870 Archdeacon Hannah printed what he described as a 'continuation
of the lost poem, _Cynthia_,' from fragments in Sir Walter's own hand
among the Hatfield MSS. Dr. Hannah, however, misled by the character of
the handwriting, by some vague allusions, in one of the fragments, to a
prison captivity, and most of all, probably, by a difficulty in dates
which we can now for the first time explain, attributed these pieces to
1603-1618, that is to say to Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower. The
second fragment, beginning 'My body in the walls captived,' belongs, no
doubt, to the later date. It is in a totally distinct metre from the
rest and has nothing to do with _Cynthia_. The first fragment bears the
stamp of much earlier date, but this also can be no part of Raleigh's
epic. The long passage then following, on the contrary, is, I think,
beyond question, a canto, almost complete, of the lost epic of 1589. It
is written in the four-line heroic stanza adopted ten years later by Sir
John Davies for his _Nosce teipsum_, and most familiar to us all in
Gray's _Churchyard Elegy_. Moreover, it is headed 'the Twenty-first and
Last Book of _The Ocean to Cynthia_.' Another note, in Raleigh's
handwriting, styles the poem _The Ocean's Love