What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hot
and putrid Marshalsea! They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or
proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch.
But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings;
he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget's iron
bars. There are those who "my Music do contemn," who will none of the
poetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless for
him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the

_Cups of turnèd maple-root,
Whereupon the skilful man
Hath engraved the Loves of Pan_,

or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue," if those base
clowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Roget
instructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a
true poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond all
racks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do is
to despair. He rises to his own greatest and best work in this
encouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble
verses as these dare question Wither's claim to a _fauteuil_ in the
Academy of Parnassus:

_If thy Verse do bravely tower
As she makes wing, she gets power,
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more;
Till she to the highest hath past,
Then she rests with Fame at last.