"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 trumpet, upon which a mighty voice could blow soul-animating strains. One of the most fascinating questions in the study of the sonnet-cycles is as to how much basis the story has in reality. Stella we know, the star-crossed love of Sidney, and Spenser's happy Elizabeth, but-- "Who is Silvia? What is she That all the swains commend her?"