in simples and the secret power of
herbs. Sometimes the poet describes a choir where the tiny wren sings
the treble, Robin Redbreast the mean, the thrush the tenor, and the
nightingale the counter-tenor, while droning bees fill in the bass; and
shows us fairy haunts and customs with a delicacy only equaled by
Drayton and Herrick.

Several lyric songs of high order are scattered through the 'Pastorals,'
and the famous 'Palinode on Man' is imbedded in the Third Book as
follows:--

"I truly know
How men are born and whither they shall go;
I know that like to silkworms of one year,
Or like a kind and wronged lover's tear,
Or on the pathless waves a rudder's dint,
Or like the little sparkles of a flint,
Or like to thin round cakes with cost perfum'd,
Or fireworks only made to be consum'd:
I know that such is man, and all that trust
In that weak piece of animated dust.
The silkworm droops, the lover's tears soon shed,
The ship's way quickly lost, the sparkle dead;
The cake burns out in haste, the firework's done,
And man as soon as these as quickly gone."

Little is known of Browne's life. He was a native of Tavistock,
Devonshire; born, it is thought, in 1591, the son of Thomas Browne, who
is supposed by Prince in his 'Worthies of Devon' to have belonged to a
knightly family. According to Wood, who says "he had a great mind in a
little body," he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford, "about the
beginning of the reign of James I." Leaving Oxford without a degree, he
was admitted in 1612 to the Inner Temple, London, and a little later he
is discovered at Oxford, engaged as private tutor to Robert Dormer,
afterward Earl of Carnarvon. In 1624 he received his degree of Master of
Arts from Oxford. He appears to have settled in Dorking, and after 1640
nothing more is heard of him. Wood thinks he died in 1645, but there is
an entry in the Tavistock register, dated March 27th, 1643, and reading
"William Browne was buried" on that day. That he was devoted to the
streams, dales, and downs of his native Devonshire is shown in the
Pastorals, where he sings:--

"Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Show me who can, so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills;
Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines;
Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines."

A