erve the transiency of roses; she never really
intended--much as she was urged--to be a shepherdess; she was never
persuaded to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let her
disappear. She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in the
epigram of many a final couplet; and of these the last has been long
written. Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she
frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are
gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something
less than mortal.

But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of the
unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little
talents. She was not set for singing, but poetry spoke of her; sometimes
when she was sleeping, and then Fletcher said--

None can rock Heaven to sleep but her.

Or when she was singing, and Carew rhymed--

Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.

Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on her
monument--

And here the precious dust is laid,
Whose purely-tempered clay was made
So fine that it the guest betrayed.

But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics; one who will never pass
from the world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth century and
in the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her inspiration never
failed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life.
Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it is
in ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use.

To every man it happens that at one time of his life--for a space of
years or for a space of months--he is convinced of death with an
incomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living the
life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death was as
often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands,
but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts. The discovery of
death did not shake the poets from their composure. On the contrary, the
verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in
honour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky
writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn;
but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are
inf