To every man it happens that at one time of his life—­for a space of years or for a space of months—­he is convinced of death with an incomparable reality.  It might seem as though literature, living the life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages.  Death was as often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands, but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts.  The discovery of death did not shake the poets from their composure.  On the contrary, the verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in honour of this Lady of the lyrics.  Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn; but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are infinitely noble.  These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by law and violence; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne, written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife—­“Now, Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy deservings”—­and singularly beautiful prose is this.  So also are Southwell’s words.  But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.

It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of life—­not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness—­that was the Lady of the lyrists.  Nor was their song of the act of dying.  With this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself.  Those two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable.  They never wearied of the wonder.  The poetry of our day has an entirely different emotion for death as parting.  It was not parting that the lyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death.  None of our contemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than the ordinary conviction of the matter.  For the great treatment of obvious things there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction.

But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be the implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passed from before the eyes of poets.

JULY

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of the green of leaves.  It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their differences of character and not of mere date.  Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull.  It has a darkened and a daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o’clock looks after the dawn.