the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, Dreams, th' imag'ry of our day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow,
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
And never wake to feel the day's disdain."

But as a rule he is perhaps too much given to musing, and too little to
rapture. In form he is important, as he undoubtedly did much to establish
the arrangement of three alternate rhymed quatrains and a couplet which, in
Shakespere's hands, was to give the noblest poetry of the sonnet and of the
world. He has also an abundance of the most exquisite single lines, such as

"O clear-eyed rector of the holy hill,"

and the wonderful opening of Sonnet XXVII., "The star of my mishap imposed
this pain."

The sixty-three sonnets, varied in different editions of Drayton's _Idea_,
are among the most puzzling of the whole group. Their average value is not
of the very highest. Yet there are here and there the strangest suggestions
of Drayton's countryman, Shakespere, and there is one sonnet, No. 61,
beginning, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," which I have
found it most difficult to believe to be Drayton's, and which is Shakespere
all over. That Drayton was the author of _Idea_ as a whole is certain, not
merely from the local allusions, but from the resemblance to the more
successful exercises of his clear, masculine, vigorous, fertile, but
occasionally rather unpoetical style. The sonnet just referred to is itself
one of the very finest existing--perhaps one of the ten or twelve best
sonnets in the world, and it may be worth while to give it with another in
contrast:--

"Our flood's Queen, Thames, for ships and swans is crowned;
And stately Severn for her shore is praised.
The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned;
And Avon's fame to Albion's cliffs is raised;
Carlegion Chester vaunts her holy Dee;
York many wonders of her Ouse can tell.
The Peak her Dove, whose banks so fertile be;
And Kent will say her Medway doth excel.
Cotswold commends her Isis to the Tame;
Our northern borders boast of Tweed's fair flood
Our western parts extol their Wily's fame;
And the old Lea brags of