ature's breast,
The Sum of Life, that Chaos did unnight!)
Dismissed mine heart from me, with thee to rest.
And now incites me cry, 'Double or quit!
Give back my heart, or take his body to it!'"

This cannot be said of the three remarkable collections yet to be noticed
which appeared in this year, to wit, Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_,
and Drayton's _Idea_. These three head the group and contain the best work,
after Shakespere and Spenser and Sidney, in the English sonnet of the time.
Constable's sonnets had appeared partly in 1592, and as they stand in
fullest collection were published in or before 1594. Afterwards he wrote,
like others, "divine" sonnets (he was a Roman Catholic) and some
miscellaneous poems, including a very pretty "Song of Venus and Adonis." He
was a close friend of Sidney, many of whose sonnets were published with
his, and his work has much of the Sidneian colour, but with fewer flights
of happily expressed fancy. The best of it is probably the following
sonnet, which is not only full of gracefully expressed images, but keeps up
its flight from first to last--a thing not universal in these Elizabethan
sonnets:--

"My Lady's presence makes the Roses red,
Because to see her lips they blush for shame.
The Lily's leaves, for envy, pale became;
And her white hands in them this envy bred.
The Marigold the leaves abroad doth spread;
Because the sun's and her power is the same.
The Violet of purple colour came,
Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed.
In brief all flowers from her their virtue take;
From her sweet breath, their sweet smells do proceed;
The living heat which her eyebeams doth make
Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed.
The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers,
Falls from mine eyes, which she dissolves in showers."

Samuel Daniel had an eminently contemplative genius which might have
anticipated the sonnet as it is in Wordsworth, but which the fashion of the
day confined to the not wholly suitable subject of Love. In the splendid
"Care-charmer Sleep," one of the tournament sonnets above noted, he
contrived, as will be seen, to put his subject under the influence of his
prevailing faculty.

"Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my anguish, and restore the light,
With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
And let