CHAPTER VI.

DRAYTON.

[A few brief remarks on Drayton and Sidney, for these writers belong very clearly to the mystic school in some of their writings.]

To show the metaphysical character of Drayton's studies, we cite the following Sonnet, explaining our understanding of it as we proceed. We must suppose the poet is contemplatively regarding himself under the idea of the all-embracing unity, a sense of which is seen to enclose the poet's individuality in that of the whole; and thus, he sees himself in and out of God; and God as in and out of himself. He is one and yet not one; two, yet but one-the mystery of which oppresses him :

You not alone, when you are still alone,
O God, from You that I could private be,

Since You one were, I never since was one.

As if he had said, Since I recognized the doctrine of

the unity, I have not realized my own individuality -if You are All, I am nothing, &c.

Since You in me, myself since out of me,

Transported from myself into your Being.

That is, since I conceived the doctrine which affirms that your life is in man or in me, I seem transported out of myself.

Though either distant, present yet to either,

Senseless with too much joy, each other seeing,
And only absent when we are together.

Here the poet seems to have been so much oppressed with his sense of this mystical presence, yet absence, of that which in some sort is both present and absent, that he cries out—

Give me myself, and take yourself again;

Devise some means but how I may forsake You.
So much is mine that doth with You remain,
That taking what is mine, with Me I take You;
You do bewitch me; O that I could fly

From myself, You, or from Yourself, I.

In this Sonnet we see a sort of Jacob's wrestling, not with God, indeed, as represented in Scripture, but with God's work, the Image of his Beauty.

Shakespeare's Sonnets, 135 and 136, supposed to be a mere play upon his name, are founded on the same difficulty, that of conceiving the unity in the duality.

Then we see the poet addressing a Sonnet to the "Soul," full of Aristotle's philosophy, and another to what he calls the "Shadow"-the visible world being regarded as the shadow of the invisible soul.

The concluding Sonnet of the "Ideas" very well exhibits the character or condition of the poet, lost as he was in his sense of the UNITY, having complete faith in it, while yet it never reached a positive realization; since that, according to his own theory, would have annihilated himself a result which, however, would have been acceptable, because of his faith; for he quite plainly tells us of the surrender of his heart, while at the same time we easily perceive that his intellect was not convinced-this surrender of the heart reminding us of Shakespeare's 133d Sonnet.

Drayton's last Sonnet reads:

Truce, gentle Love, a parley now I crave;
Methinks 'tis long since first these wars begun.

That is, the poet had long been engaged in his met

aphysical studies into nature, addressed as his gentle Love.

Nor thou, [says he,] nor I, the better yet can have:

Bad is the match where neither party won.

I offer the conditions of fair peace,

My heart for hostage that it shall remain;
Discharge our forces, here let malice cease,
So for my pledge thou give me pledge again :
Or if nothing but death will serve thy turn,
Still thirsting for subversion of my state;
Do what thou canst; rase, massacre, and burn,
Let the world see the utmost of thy hate :
I send defiance; since, if overthrown,

Thou vanquishing, the conquest is mine own.

Why was the conquest his own? Because, in his theory, he had so conceived the Unity that whatever might happen to him belonged to the Whole, of which he was an inseparable part, sharing in the whole.

This sense of the supreme claims of Sovereign Beauty over all human considerations, is conspicuous in the Shakespeare Sonnets, in which the poet, like Drayton, to use an Eastern expression, so acknowledges his absorption in the whole, that no loss whatever can be visited upon him in the inferior state, but

what he is sure to reap the benefit of in the superior life, which Drayton, like Shakespeare, calls his "better part," regarding it evidently as his proper life. (Compare Drayton's 44th with Shakespeare's 39th and 74th Sonnets.)

In the 88th Sonnet, Shakespeare, not merely carrying out to the very extreme the doctrine of Chaucer, to think no ill of his Mistress, and to excuse 66 quickly" whatever may seem wrong, goes even beyond Chaucer, and offers, when aggrieved himself, to take part and "fight" against himself:

88. Upon thy part [says he] I can set down a story

Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted;

That thou, in losing me, shalt win much glory:

And I by this will be a gainer too;

For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,

The injuries that to myself I do,

Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.

Such is my love, to thee I so belong,

That for thy right myself will bear all wrong."

The poet, in this mystical mode of writing, is, in reality, enforcing the Scripture doctrine of suf fering for Christ's sake.

The expression, "for thy right”—fighting, or suffering for thy right-signifies for thy sake, and