were not, in some ears at least, without
monotony. For after Daniel's _Delia_, Constable's _Diana_, Lodge's
_Phillis_, Drayton's _Idea_, Fletcher's _Licia_, Brooke's _Caelica_,
Percy's _Coelia_, N.L.'s _Zepheria_, and J.C.'s _Alcilia_, and perhaps
a few other sonnet-cycles had been written, Chapman in 1595 made his
_Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy_, the opening sonnet of which
reveals his critical attitude:

"Muses that sing Love's sensual empery,
And lovers kindling your enraged fires
At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye,
Blown with the empty breath of vain desires,
You that prefer the painted cabinet
Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye,
That all your joys in dying figures set,
And stain the living substance of your glory,
Abjure those joys, abhor their memory,
And let my love the honoured subject be
Of love, and honour's complete history;
Your eyes were never yet let in to see
The majesty and riches of the mind,
But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind."

It must be confessed that the "painted cabinet" of the lady's beauty
absorbs more attention than the "majesty and riches of the mind," but
the glints of a loftier ideal shining now and then among the
conventions, lift the cycle above the level of mere ear-pleasing rhythms
and fantastical imageries. Moreover, the sonnet-cycles on the whole show
an independence and spontaneousness of poetic energy, a delight in the
pure joy of making, a _naivete_, that richly frame the picture of the
golden world they present. When Lodge, addressing his "pleasing
thoughts, apprentices of love," cries out:

"Show to the world, though poor and scant my skill is,
How sweet thoughts be that are but thought on Phillis,"

we feel that we are being taken back to an age more childlike than our
own; and when the sonneteers vie with each other on the themes of sleep,
death, time, and immortality, the door often stands open toward
sublimity. Then when the sonnet-cycle was consecrated to noble and
spiritual uses in Chapman's _Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy_,
Barnes's _Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets_, Constable's _Spiritual
Sonnets in Honour of God and His Saints_, and Donne's _Holy Sonnets_,
all made before 1600, the symbolic theme was added to the conventions of
the sonnet-realm, the scope of its content was broadened; and the sonnet
was well on its way toward a time when it could be named a trumpe