figures, his was the most dazzling, and his death at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of romance which had gathered round his name.  His literary exercises were various:  in prose he wrote the Arcadia and the Apology for Poetry, the one the beginning of a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first of the series of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art which some of our English poets have left us.  To the Arcadia we shall have to return later in this chapter.  It is his other great work, the sequence of sonnets entitled Astrophel and Stella, which concerns us here.  They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled.  As poetry they mark an epoch.  They are the first direct expression of an intimate and personal experience in English literature, struck off in the white heat of passion, and though they are coloured at times with that over-fantastic imagery which is at once a characteristic fault and excellence of the writing of the time, they never lose the one merit above all others of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity.  The note is struck with certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:—­

“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
 That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—­
 Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,—­
 Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—­
 I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
 Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain;
 Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow
 Some fresh and fruitful flower upon my sunburned brain. 
 But words came halting forth ... 
 Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
 ‘Fool,’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”

And though he turned others’ leaves it was quite literally looking in his heart that he wrote.  He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth.  All that he tells is the fruit of experience, dearly bought: 

“Desire! desire!  I have too dearly bought
 With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware. 
 Too long, too long! asleep thou hast me brought,
 Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare.”

and earlier in the sequence—­

“I now have learned love right and learned even so
 As those that being poisoned poison know.”

In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he renounces earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because it fades brings but fading pleasure: 

“Then farewell, world!  Thy uttermost I see. 
 Eternal love, maintain thy life in me.”

The sonnets were published after Sidney’s death, and it is certain that like Shakespeare’s they were never intended for publication at all.  The point is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney’s sincerity, but were any vindication needed another more certain might be found.  The Arcadia is strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of the literary imagination.  Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it with those in the romance.