Fayre Philomel, night-musicke of the spring,
      Sweetly recordes her tunefull harmony,
    And with deepe sobbes, and dolefull sorrowing,
      Before fayre Cinthya actes her Tragedy.

In Eclogue II a ‘wise’ shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a somewhat gruesome picture of human fate—­

    And when the bell is readie to be tol’d
      To call the wormes to thine Anatomie,
      Remember then, my boy, what once I said to thee!

Even this, however, fails to shake the lover’s faith in the gentle passion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from Spenser: 

    Oh divine love, which so aloft canst raise,
      And lift the minde out of this earthly mire.

The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of Beta, is closely modelled on the ‘April,’ and abounds with such reminiscences as the following: 

    Make her a goodly Chapilet of azur’d Colombine,
    And wreath about her Coronet with sweetest Eglantine: 
      Bedeck our Beta all with Lillies,
      And the dayntie Daffadillies,
    With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice,
    With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice.

Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators.  In the fourth eclogue two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is Sidney.  In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke.  The seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly, in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the Calender, amid the frosts of winter.

These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the ’Poems Lyric and Pastoral’ (c. 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth.  This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains several songs.  The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work, and one song at least is in the author’s daintiest manner.  He seldom surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines: 

    Through yonder vale as I did passe,
      Descending from the hill,
    I met a smerking bony lasse;
      They call her Daffadill: 

    Whose presence as along she went,
      The prety flowers did greet,
    As though their heads they downward bent
      With homage to her feete.

Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book—­

    Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,
    Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle—­

could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime: