as ever warned modesty to keep
While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature's fire:
Must I look on a-cold while others warm them?
Do Vulcan's brothers in such fine nets arm them?

"Was it for this that I might Myra see
_Washing the water with her beauties white_?
Yet would she never write her love to me:
Thinks wit of change when thoughts are in delight?
Mad girls may safely love as they may leave;
No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive."

Had Brooke always written with this force and directness he would have been
a great poet. As it is, he has but the ore of poetry, not the smelted
metal.

For there is no doubt that Sidney here holds the primacy, not merely in
time but in value, of the whole school, putting Spenser and Shakespere
aside. That thirty or forty years' diligent study of Italian models had
much to do with the extraordinary advance visible in his sonnets over those
of Tottel's _Miscellany_ is, no doubt, undeniable. But many causes besides
the inexplicable residuum of fortunate inspiration, which eludes the most
careful search into literary cause and effect, had to do with the
production of the "lofty, insolent, and passionate vein," which becomes
noticeable in English poetry for the first time about 1580, and which
dominates it, if we include the late autumn-summer of Milton's last
productions, for a hundred years. Perhaps it is not too much to say that
this makes its very first appearance in Sidney's verse, for _The Shepherd's
Calendar_, though of an even more perfect, is of a milder strain. The
inevitable tendency of criticism to gossip about poets instead of
criticising poetry has usually mixed a great deal of personal matter with
the accounts of _Astrophel and Stella_, the series of sonnets which is
Sidney's greatest literary work, and which was first published some years
after his death in an incorrect and probably pirated edition by Thomas
Nash. There is no doubt that there was a real affection between Sidney
(Astrophel) and Penelope Devereux (Stella), daughter of the Earl of Essex,
afterwards Lady Rich, and that marriage proving unhappy, Lady Mountjoy. But
the attempts which have been made to identify every hint and allusion in
the series with some fact or date, though falling short of the unimaginable
folly of scholastic labour-lost which has been expended on the sonnets of
Shakespere, still must appear somewhat idle to those who know the usual
genesis of love