Drummond's reputation is based upon the 'Poems,' and upon the Jeremy-Taylor-like 'Cypress Grove,' published in 1623 in connection with the religious verses called 'Flowers of Sion.' 'Cypress Grove' is an essay on death, akin in spirit to the religious temper of the Middle Ages, and in philosophic breadth to the diviner mood of Plato. Only a mind of a high order would have conceived so beautiful and lofty a meditation on the Final Mystery. This brief essay marks the utmost reach of Drummond's mind, and shows the strength of that serene spirituality, which could thus hold its way undisturbed by the sectarian bitterness that fixed a great gulf between England and Scotland. 'The History of the Five Jameses,' which Drummond was ten years in compiling and which was not published until six years after his death, added nothing to his reputation. It lacked alike the diligent minuteness of the chronicler and the broader view of the historian. Many minor papers on the state of religion and politics, chief of which is the political tract 'Irene,' show Drummond's aggressive interest in contemporary affairs. It is not generally known that this gentle scholar was also an inventor of military engines. In 1626 Charles I. engaged him to produce sixteen machines and "not a few inventions besides." The biographers have remained curiously ignorant of this phase of his activity, but the State papers show that the King named him "our faithful subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden." He died in 1649, his death being hastened, it was said, by his passion of grief over the martyrdom of King Charles. SEXTAIN The heaven doth not contain so many stars, So many leaves not prostrate lie in woods When autumn's old and Boreas sounds his wars, So many waves have not the ocean floods, As my rent mind hath torments all the night, And heart spends sighs when Phoebus brings the light. Why should I have been partner of the light, Who, crost in birth by bad aspéct of stars, Have never since had happy day or night? Why was not I a liver in the woods, Or citizen of Thetis's crystal floods, Than made a man, for love and fortune's wars? I look each day when death should end the wars, Uncivil wars, 'twixt sense and reason's light; My pains I count to mountains, meads, and floods, And of my sorrow partners make the stars; All desolate I haunt the fearful woods, When I should give myself to rest at night. With watchful eyes I ne'er behold the night, Mother of peace, but ah! to me of wars, And Cynthia, queen-like, shining through the woods, When straight those lamps come in my thought, whose light My judgment dazzled, passing brightest stars, And then mine eyes en-isle themselves with floods.