of an unaccustomed hand than of incapacity for harmonious work.  Some of the imagery, especially the “crystal buckets,” will suggest those grotesque drawings called Emblems, which were much in use before and after this period, and, indeed, were only a putting into visible shape of such metaphors and similes as some of the most popular poets of the time, especially Doctor Donne, indulged in; while the profusion of earthly riches attributed to the heavenly paths and the places of repose on the journey, may well recall Raleigh’s own descriptions of South American glories.  Englishmen of that era believed in an earthly Paradise beyond the Atlantic, the wonderful reports of whose magnificence had no doubt a share in lifting the imaginations and hopes of the people to the height at which they now stood.

There may be an appearance of irreverence in the way in which he contrasts the bribeless Hall of Heaven with the proceedings at his own trial, where he was browbeaten, abused, and, from the very commencement, treated as a guilty man by Sir Edward Coke, the king’s attorney.  He even puns with the words angels and fees.  Burning from a sense of injustice, however, and with the solemnity of death before him, he could not be guilty of conscious irreverence, at least.  But there is another remark I have to make with regard to the matter, which will bear upon much of the literature of the time:  even the great writers of that period had such a delight in words, and such a command over them, that like their skilful horsemen, who enjoyed making their steeds show off the fantastic paces they had taught them, they played with the words as they passed through their hands, tossing them about as a juggler might his balls.  But even herein the true master of speech showed his masterdom:  his play must not be by-play; it must contribute to the truth of the idea which was taking form in those words.  We shall see this more plainly when we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney’s work.  There is no irreverence in it.  Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly when he says: 

  I saw in every stander-by
  Pale death, life only in thy eye.

The following hymn is also attributed to Raleigh.  If it has less brilliance of fancy, it has none of the faults of the preceding, and is far more artistic in construction and finish, notwithstanding a degree of irregularity.

  Rise, oh my soul, with thy desires to heaven;
    And with divinest contemplation use
  Thy time, where time’s eternity is given;
    And let vain thoughts no more thy thoughts abuse,
      But down in darkness let them lie: 
      So live thy better, let thy worse thoughts die!