, and his freedom's song!
Balm of the bruised heart! man's chief felicity!
Brother of quiet Death, when Life is too too long!
A Comedy it is, and now an History;
What is not sleep unto the feeble mind?
It easeth him that toils, and him that's sorry;
It makes the deaf to hear; to see, the blind;
Ungentle Sleep! thou helpest all but me,
For when I sleep my soul is vexed most.
It is Fidessa that doth master thee
If she approach; alas! thy power is lost.
But here she is! See, how he runs amain!
I fear, at night, he will not come again."

_Diella_, a set of thirty-eight sonnets prefixed to the "Amorous poem of
Diego and Genevra," is more elaborate in colouring but somewhat less fresh
and genuine; while _Chloris_, whose author was a friend of Spenser's,
approaches to the pastoral in the plan and phrasing of its fifty sonnets.

Such are the most remarkable members of a group of English poetry, which
yields to few such groups in interest. It is connected by a strong
similarity of feeling--if any one likes, even by a strong imitation of the
same models. But in following those models and expressing those feelings,
its members, even the humblest of them, have shown remarkable poetical
capacity; while of the chiefs we can only say, as has been said more than
once already, that the matter and form together acknowledge, and indeed
admit of, no superior.

In close connection with these groups of sonnets, displaying very much the
same poetical characteristics and in some cases written by the same
authors, there occurs a great body of miscellaneous poetical writing
produced during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and ranging
from long poems of the allegorical or amatory kind to the briefest lyrics
and madrigals. Sometimes this work appeared independently; sometimes it was
inserted in the plays and prose pamphlets of the time. As has already been
said, some of our authors, notably Lodge and Greene, did in this way work
which far exceeds in merit any of their more ambitious pieces, and which in
a certain unborrowed and incommunicable poetic grace hardly leaves anything
of the time behind it. Shakespere himself, in _Venus and Adonis_ and
_Lucrece_, has in a more elaborate but closely allied kind of poetry
displayed less mature, but scarcely less, genius than in his dramatic and
sonnet work. It is my own opinion that the actual poetical worth of Richard
Barnfield,