a

Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
Or hearest thou rather pure ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun,
Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle didst invest

The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.

Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
Revisitest not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn,
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget

Those other two equalled with me in fate,
(So were I equalled with them in renown!)
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,"

с

a

d

And Tiresias and Phineus, & prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers, as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

b Mæonides, Homer, the greatest poet of Greece.

Thamyris, a Thracian poet.

year

a Phineus, a Grecian poet.

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial light,

Shine inwards, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.

EXERCISE 1.-Explain :-Mantle, void, hallowed, light, eternal, revisit, dawn, orbs, wander, spring, grove, Sion, wakeful bird. EXERCISE 2.-Learn from "Thus with the year," to the end.

ENGLISH IN THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.

Material, important.
Adequate, equal to.

Theology, system of truths re-
lating to God.
Extracted, drawn from.
Policy, the principles of action
by governments.

Navigation, the art of travelling
by sea.

Poetry, the truthful expression
of the beautiful.
Fiction, events narrated from
imagination rather than from
fact.

Diction, language used to ex-
press thought.

Reformation, making better.
Scope, limits of action.

Aroused, called into active exercise.

Reason, the power by which

causes and effects are traced. Discourses, formal speeches or

sermons.

Judgment, that by which we decide aright.

Religion, that by which man
is brought into relation with
God.

Wisdom, the right use of know-
ledge.
Savage, rude.

Engendered, brought into being.
Oppressed, made to submit to

some wrong.

In the last lesson we said that the English of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. did not differ, in any very material degree, from that of our own time. We will now

consider it a little more in detail, as it was used by the best authors of the second half of the sixteenth, or the beginning of the seventeenth century.

So rich was this period in great writers, and so fully was the language developed by them, that, to use the words of Dr. Johnson, "From the authors who rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be made adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If," he adds, "the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translators of the Bible, the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon, the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh, the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney, and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed."

And when we come to study the history of the people during that and the immediately preceding period, we are at no loss to account for the fact; for the Reformation, which had been brought to a practical issue in the reign of Henry VIII., had given scope to religious inquiry and a degree of freedom in the expression of individual belief; while the discovery of the great western continent, and its consequent commercial enterprises, had aroused the imagination, and opened new fields of inquiry and effort; these great events, and others flowing from them, followed as they were by a period of great national prosperity, gave opportunity for the exercise of the powers thus called into action; whilst the language, enriched as it had been during the past century by the study of the best Latin and Greek authors, was now equal to the expression of the new ideas and thoughts thus brought into being.

The following quotation from Richard Hooker's works, and written about 1590, forms a good example of the prose of that period.

But so it is the name of the light of nature is made hateful

with men; the star of reason and learning, and all other such like helps, beginneth no otherwise to be thought of, than if it were an unlucky comet; or as if God had so accursed it, that it should never shine or give light in things concerning our duty any way towards Him, but be esteemed as that star in the Revelation, called Wormwood, which, being fallen from heaven, maketh rivers and waters in which it falleth so bitter that men tasting them die thereof. A number there are who think they cannot admire as they ought the power and authority of the word of God, if in things Divine they should attribute any force to man's reason; for which cause they never use reason so willingly as to disgrace reason. Their usual and common discourses are unto this effect: First, the natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned, etc. By these and the like disputes an opinion hath spread itself very far in the world, as if the way to be ripe in faith were to be raw in wit and judgment: as if reason were an enemy unto religion, childish simplicity the mother of ghostly and Divine wisdom.

Here, no one can be at a loss to understand the whole passage; for, with the exception of the older verb terminations, an occasional quaintness in the structure of the sentences, together with the use of the word "wit" in its old sense of knowledge, and "ghostly" for spiritual, the quotation might well be mistaken for that of some living divine.

An extract from Shakespeare may well illustrate the poetry of the age.

Duke. What would you have? Your gentleness should force, More than your force move us to gentleness.

Orl. I almost die for food, and let me have it.

Duke. Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.

Orl. Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you:

I thought that all things had been savage here;

And therefore put I on the countenance

Of stern commandment. But whate'er you are,

That in this desert inaccessible,

Under the shade of melancholy boughs,

Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time;

If ever you have looked on better days;

If ever been where bells have knolled to church;
If ever sat at any good man's feast;

If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear;

And know what 'tis to pity, and be pitied;
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be,
In the which hope, I blush, and hide

my sword.
Duke. True is it, that we have seen better days;
And have with holy bell been knolled to church;
And sat at good men's feasts; and wiped our eyes
Of drops that sacred pity hath engendered:
And, therefore, sit you down in gentleness,
And take upon command what help we have,
That to your wanting may be ministered.

Orl. Then, but forbear your food a little while,
Whiles, like a doe, I go to find my fawn,
And give it food. There is an old poor man,
Who after me hath many a weary step
Limped in pure love; till he be first sufficed,
Oppressed with two weak evils, age and hunger,
I will not touch a bit.

Duke.
Go, find him out,
And we will nothing waste till you return.

Orl. I thank ye; and be blessed for your good comfort.
-As You Like It.

EXERCISE 1.-Define:-Authors, translators, national, prosperity, church, expression, admire, comet, perceiveth, discerned, enemy, knolled.

EXERCISE 2.—Turn into easy prose the speech of Orlando, beginning, "Speak you so gently," to "hide my sword."