Lodge was one of the earliest to follow the example of Sidney in linking a sequence of sonnets together into a sonnet-cycle. The _Astrophel and Stella_ was published in 1591, though it had doubtless before this been handed about, as was the Elizabethan fashion, in manuscript. Early in 1591 also when Daniel was probably abroad, twenty-seven of the fifty-seven sonnets that a year later formed the sonnet-cycle _Delia_ were published in his absence. Now in August of 1591 Lodge set sail with Cavendish on that long voyage to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan from which he did not return till early in ninety-three, and it was during his absence that Daniel's and Constable's sonnet-cycles came out. It is possible that Lodge saw Daniel's series, as he doubtless did Sidney's, in manuscript before he left England, but the Induction to _Phillis_, which carries a message to Delia's "sweet prophet," was almost certainly written later, and in the absence of further proof it seems no more than fair to allow Lodge to share with Daniel and Constable the honour of being the earliest to take the hint Sidney had offered. On the whole, Lodge's sonnets show a much more cheerful and buoyant temper than Daniel's "wailing verse." The "sad horror, pale grief, prostrate despair" that inform the _Delia_, are replaced in the _Phillis_ by a spirit of airy toying, a pleasure in the graces of fancy even when they cluster around a feeling of sadness. During Lodge's absence, his friend Robert Green published several pieces for him, and in one of the prefaces promised the public to present on his return "what labours Lodge's sea-studies afford." _Phillis_ was the chief of these sea-studies, and was like _Rosalynde_ "hatcht in the stormes of the ocean and feathered in the surges of many perillous seas." But as far as the imagery of the sonnets is concerned, the pageantry of day and night at sea might have passed before blinded eyes; if it made any impression, it was in the form of ocean-nymphs and Cupid at the helm. The poet was in Arcadia, Phillis was a shepherdess, and the conventional imageries of the pastoral valley were the environment. "May it please you," he says in dedicating the book to the Countess of Shrewsbury, "to looke and like of homlie Phillis in her Country caroling, and to countenance her poore and affectionate sheapheard." The Countess of Shrewsbury he chooses for the "Sovereign and she-Maecenas" of his toil, and promises her "as much in affection as any other can performe in perfection;" but the name of Phillis is no cover for the personality of a grand lady, and therefore no puzzling questions disturb the pleasure of the reader as the gentle modulations, the insidious alliterations, and the musical cadences of his double rhymes fall upon the ear.