"magical realisation of the spirit of evening" in the thirty-seventh,
and above all in the naïve and passionate sixty-first, there is a rude
strength that pierces beneath the formalities and touches and moves
the heart. Drayton, like Sidney and Daniel and Shakespeare, draws
freely upon the general thought-storehouse of the Italianate
sonneteers: time and the transitoriness of beauty, the lover's
extremes, the Platonic ideas of soul-functions and of love-madness,
the phoenix and Icarus and all the classic gods, engage his fancy
first or last; and no sonnet trifler has been more attracted by the
great theme of immortality in verse than he. When honouring Idea in
the favourite mode he cries

"Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise."

A late writer holds that years have falsified this prophecy. It is
true that Lamb valued Drayton chiefly as the panegyrist of his native
earth, and we would hardly venture to predict the future of our
sonneteer; but the fact remains that now three hundred years after his
time, his lifelong devotion to the prototype of Idea constitutes, as
he conventionally asserted it would, his most valid claim to interest,
and that the sonnets where this love has found most potent expression
mount the nearest to the true note of immortality.




TO THE READER OF THESE SONNETS