Then she spake! her speech was such As not ear, but heart did touch. "Astrophel, (said she) my love, Cease in these effects to prove! Now be still!--yet still believe me, Thy grief more than death would grieve me. Trust me, while, I thus deny, In myself the smart I try: Tyrant honour doth thus use thee; Stella's self might not refuse thee! Therefore, dear! this no more move: Lest, though I leave not thy love, (Which too deep in me is framed!) _I should blush when thou art named!_" The sentiment he has made her express in the last line is beautiful, and too feminine and appropriate not to have been taken from nature; but, unhappily, it did not always govern her conduct. How far her coquetry proceeded we do not know. Sydney, about a year afterwards, married the daughter of Secretary Walsingham, and survived his marriage but a short time. This theme of song, this darling of fame, and ornament of his age, perished at the battle of Zutphen, in the very summer of his glorious youth. "He had trod," as the author of the Effigies Poeticæ so beautifully expresses it, "from his cradle to his grave, amid incense and flowers--and died in a dream of glory!" His death was not only such as became the soldier and Christian;--the natural elegance and sensibility of his mind followed him even to the verge of the tomb: in his last moments, when the mortification had commenced, and all hope was over, he called for music into his chamber, and lay listening to it with tranquil pleasure. Sydney died in his thirty-fourth year. Among the numerous poets who lamented this deep-felt loss (volumes, I believe, were filled with the tributes paid to his memory), was Spenser, whom Sydney had early patronised. His elegy, however, is too laboured, too lengthy, too artificial, to please altogether, though containing some lines of great beauty. It is singular, and a little incomprehensible to our modern ideas of _bienséance_ and good taste, that in this elegy, which Spenser dedicates to Sydney's widow after her remarriage with Essex, he introduces Stella as lamenting over the body of Astrophel, tells us how she beat her fair bosom--"the treasury of joy,"--how she tore her lovely hair, wept out her eyes,-- And with sweet kisses suckt the parting breath Out of his lips. At length, through excess of grief, or the compassion of the gods, she is changed into the flower, "by some called starlight, by others penthia." This might pass in those days; though, considering all the circumstances, it is strange that, even then, it escaped ridicule.