A plant shall from my wrinkled forehead spring Which once enflamed with the stolne heavenly fire Shall breath into this lifeless corse inspire. Despite of Fate the elements combine to form the plant. Their work accomplished, it is found that Tellus had tempered too much terrene corruption in its composition. But for this The man that tasted it should never die But stand in record of eternitie. Jupiter is enraged at the daring attempt to usurp his divine prerogative and banishes the plant to an unknown region. After long searching the graces discover it in the palace of the great Montezuma. They are royally entertained and wish for no greater happiness than to remain eternally regaling themselves with the vapour of the divine herb. Another flight of fancy reveals the ‘sweet and sole delight of mortal men’ as a nymph of Virginia receiving the visits of Jupiter clad in the garb of a shepherd. Juno, ever watchful over the movements of her lord, discovers the intrigue, and with threatening gesture storms at the poor thing and transforms her into the Indian weed. It may be that the divine afflatus which Drayton, speaking of Marlowe, says, ‘rightly should possess a poet’s brain,’ imaging ‘those brave translunary things that the first poets had,’ had not yet descended upon the young poet of Grace Dieu. But it cannot be denied him that his diction is stately, and that at times he displays flashes of grandeur. Chalmers remarks of him that he brought to his task ‘a genius uncommonly fertile and commanding.’ All through his brief career he had yearned after a true poet’s renown. ‘No earthly gift,’ he wrote, ‘lasts after death but fame.’ And he sighed over the thought that all his labour should be left incomplete—‘That’s my vexation, that’s my only grief.’ His longing for posthumous fame Drayton tenderly notices in the following lines: Thy care for that which was not worth thy breath. Brought on too soon thy much lamented death. But heaven was kind and would not let thee see The plagues that must upon this nation be. It is hard to say what plagues Drayton refers to, but it does seem unkind of Elizabethan scholars to have so neglected Sir John Beaumont, the purity and simplicity of whose life and elevated tone of work place him in marked contrast to his more versatile and distinguished brother, Francis. Leaving the domain of the poet let us turn our gaze for a moment towards the heavens. Night’s sable mantle shrouds a sleeping world, and all is repose save the spirit of our dreams. Freed from control the ever active one flits at will in the realms of fairy-land, overleaping all difficulties, revelling in phantasms new and wonderful till day dawns, when she returns to her abode in man’s heavy brain to lighten the labour of his daily toil, and to store up memories of a world closed to mortal eyes.