9 13 Sidney's poetry is singularly unequal; his short life, his frequent absorption in public employment, hindered doubtless the development of his genius. His great contemporary fame, second only, it appears, to Spenser's, has been hence obscured. At times he is heavy and even prosaic; his simplicity is rude and bare; his verse unmelodious. These, however, are the 'defects of his merits.' In a certain depth and chivalry of feeling,--in the rare and noble quality of disinterestedness (to put it in one word),--he has no superior, hardly perhaps an equal, amongst our Poets; and after or beside Shakespeare's Sonnets, his _Astrophel and Stella_, in the Editor's judgment, offers the most intense and powerful picture of the passion of love in the whole range of our poetry.--_Hundreds of years_: 'The very rapture of love,' says Mr. Ruskin; 'A lover like this does not believe his mistress can grow old or die.' 12 19 Readers who have visited Italy will be reminded of more than one picture by this gorgeous Vision of Beauty, equally sublime and pure in its Paradisaical naturalness. Lodge wrote it on a voyage to 'the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries;' and he seems to have caught, in those southern seas, no small portion of the qualities which marked the almost contemporary Art of Venice,--the glory and the glow of Veronese, Titian, or Tintoret.--From the same romance is No. 71: a charming picture in the purest style of the later Italian Renaissance. _The clear_ (l. 1) is the crystalline or outermost heaven of the old cosmography. _For a fair there's fairer none_: If you desire a Beauty, there is none more beautiful than Rosaline. 14 22 Another gracious lyric from an Elizabethan Song-book, first reprinted (it is believed) in Mr. W. J. Linton's 'Rare Poems,' in 1883. 15 23 _that fair thou owest_: that beauty thou ownest. 16 25 From one of the three Song-books of T. Campion, who appears to have been author of the words which he set to music. His merit as a lyrical poet (recognized in his own time, but since then forgotten) has been again brought to light by Mr. Bullen's taste and research:--_swerving_ (st. 2) is his conjecture for _changing_ in the text of 1601. 20 31 _the star Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken_: apparently, Whose stellar influence is uncalculated, although his angular altitude from the plane of the astrolabe or artificial horizon used by astrologers has been determined. 20 32 This lovely song appears, as here given, in Puttenham's 'Arte of English Poesie,' 1589. A longer and inferior form was published in the 'Arcadia' of 1590: but Puttenham's prefatory words clearly assign his version to Sidney's own authorship. 23 37 _keel_: keep cooler by stirring round. 24 39 _expense_: loss. -- 40 _prease_: press. 25 41 _Nativity, once in the main of light_: when a star has risen and entered on the full stream of light;--another of the astrological phrases no longer familiar.