order--“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show,”--with its ringing last line, “‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart and write,’” and the last, “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,” are abundantly lofty and passionate; and were, in the sense in which the word was used, “insolent”--that is, unprecedented--in the English poetry of that generation. To these it would be easy to add many others. “With how slow steps, O Moon”; “Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance,” are but two of them; while the sonnet “Good brother Philip” is a gem of gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not confine himself to the so-called legitimate form of two quatrains and two tercets, but tried experiments. He stretched the term sonnet as far as it will go when he applied it to twelve Alexandrines and a heroic couplet. Nor was it in the sonnet only that Sidney set an example. The songs of _Astrophel and Stella_ usher in the great Elizabethan lyric, in which there is nothing to surpass the “Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth” in soaring melody. The verse which abounds in the _Arcadia_ and the metrical version of the Psalms does not reach the level of the _Astrophel and Stella_. Yet it appears inferior only when judged by his own best work, and the best that was to follow. We may doubt whether Sidney has a claim to the place in the active life of Elizabeth’s time assigned him by the affection of Fulke Greville and by tradition, but there can be no question that he stands beside Spenser as one of the beginners of the unsurpassed poetic literature of her reign. [SN: _Watson._]