I protest, George, you shall not venture out again--no, not by daylight--without a sufficient pair of spectacles--in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years' after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only! I have nothing but water in my head o' nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow--a mournful procession--_suicidal faces_, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue-constrained Lazari--Pluto's half-subjects--stolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion--or is it G.D.?--in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death. And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus. A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G.D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet, or historian--of Grecian or of Roman lore--to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected--him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter--him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth[1], with newest airs prepared to greet ----; and, patron of the gentle Christ's boy,--who should have been his patron through life--the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable Æsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered. [Footnote 1: Graium _tantum vidit_.] SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY