Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal Bembo and the French poets of the _Pléiade_, notably Ronsard and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney, Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in the impatient strain of Petrarch: But ah! Desire still cries, give me some food. And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly love: Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust, And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things: Grow rich in that which never taketh rust, Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings. And so Spenser: Many lewd lays (Ah! woe is me the more) In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love, I have in the heat of youth made heretofore; That in light wits affection loose did move, But all these follies now I do reprove. But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more realistic description of passion, its radically different conception of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman, and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus! Soles occidere et redire possunt: Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetua una dormienda. Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain; Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie. Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea Whose action is no stronger than a flower? Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the _Songs and Sonets_ and the _Elegies_ of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the 'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the goodly exiled train Of gods and goddesses