When Loe! (O Fate!) his worke not seeming fit To walk in equipage with better wit, Is kept from light, there gnawne by Moathes and Wormes, At which he frets. And, in 1623, when he wrote his commendatory verses for Massinger’s _Duke of Millaine_, he was convinced that there was no demand for any poetry but the drama:— I am snapt already, and may go my way; The Poet-Critic’s come; I hear him say: This Youth’s mistook, the Author’s work’s a Play. It would be easy to make a pleasant little volume of selections from the more striking or more beautiful passages in Browne’s Pastorals, but here we can hardly find room for half-a-dozen specimens. Of death he writes:— Death is no stranger, And generous Spirits never fear for danger. Of cheerful content:— Where there’s content, ’tis ever Holy-day. Of the Good Shepherd he says that from the stem Of that sweet singer of Jerusalem, Came the best Shepherd ever flocks did keepe, Who yeelded up his life to save his sheepe. In Book 2 we have such satire as this, of the “fawning citizen,” Who “lives a Knave to leave his sonne a Knight”; such strong lines as this of the sea:— The vast insatiate Sea doth still devour; such vivid pictures as this:— The whistling Reeds upon the water’s side, Shot up their sharpe heads in a stately pride; or sweetly-soothing verses like these, on the stillness of nightfall:— Onely the curled Streames soft chidings kept; And little Gales that from the greene leafe swept Dry summer dust, in fearefull whisp’rings stir’d, As loth to waken any singing bird. Such passages as these must be admired by every lover of nature, but the poet will always be doubly dear to those who have lived amongst the scenes he describes so tenderly and so faithfully. My own feeling of indebtedness to one whose poetry had given a sort of sacredness to his native haunts was thus expressed when I was in clerical charge of the Tamar side of Tavistock, more than thirty years ago:—