Love hath reason, reason none, THRENOS. 1 Beauty, truth, and rarity, Here enclosed in cinders lie. 2 Death is now the phoenix' nest; 3 Leaving no posterity :— 4 Truth may seem, but cannot be ; 5 To this urn let those repair For these dead birds sigh a prayer. WM. SHAKSPEARE. 1Threne:' funeral song. END OF SHAKSPEARE'S FOEMS. THE LIFE OF HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY. THE Earl of Surrey presents himself in various interesting lights amongst our poets. In the first place, besides his romantic history and his early doom, he was both a lord and a poet, a combination which has not been found very often in our literature-Byron being the only other very eminent bard who has worn the coronet; secondly, he was one of our earliest improvers in the art of versification; and, thirdly, he first introduced the sonnet and blank verse into England, and deserves the gratitude of all who enter into the spirit of Wordsworth's fine lines-"Scorn not the sonnet;" and of all who remember that the greatest poems in our language, such as "Shakspeare's Plays," the "Paradise Lost," the "Night Thoughts," the "Seasons," the "Task," Southey's "Roderick," and many others, have been written in blank verse. Henry Howard was born, it is supposed, at Framlingham, in Suffolk, somewhere between 1516 and 1518. The family from which he sprung was an old one, but had had a somewhat fluctuating career between its first origin and the birth of the poet. It has been traced to a period antecedent to the Conquest. Under the reign of the first two Edwards, William Howard is said by some to have been a knight, and to have held the office of Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas but this is doubtful. His descendant, Sir Robert Howard, married Margaret Mowbray, the great-great-granddaughter ; |