initely noble. These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by
law and violence; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne,
written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife--"Now,
Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy
deservings"--and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also are
Southwell's words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic
than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.

It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of
life--not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness--that was
the Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of the act of dying. With
this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself. Those
two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that
its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which
they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable. They
never wearied of the wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirely
different emotion for death as parting. It was not parting that the
lyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death. None of our
contemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than the
ordinary conviction of the matter. For the great treatment of obvious
things there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction.

But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be the
implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passed
from before the eyes of poets.

JULY

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of the
green of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity,
for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their
differences of character and not of mere date. Almost all the green is
grave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, in
majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to
inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks after
the dawn.

Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as at
night. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty, common
freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day. In
childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise
than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher
sensibility for Ap