No More Learning

Readers who have visited Italy will be reminded of more than one picture
by this gorgeous Vision of Beauty, equally sublime and pure in its
Paradisaical naturalness. Lodge wrote it on a voyage to "the Islands of
Terceras and the Canaries"; and he seems to have caught, in those
southern seas, no small portion of the qualities which marked the almost
contemporary Art of Venice,--the glory and the glow of Veronese, or
Titian, or Tintoret, when he most resembles Titian, and all but
surpasses him.

_The clear_: is the crystalline or outermost heaven of the old
cosmography. For _resembling_ other copies give _refining_: the correct
reading is perhaps _revealing_.

_For a fair there's fairer none_: If you desire a Beauty, there is none
more beautiful than Rosaline.


Poem 18.

_that fair thou owest_: that beauty thou ownest.


Poem 23.

_the star Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken_:
apparently, Whose stellar influence is uncalculated, although his
angular altitude from the plane of the astrolabe or artificial horizon
used by astrologers has been determined.


Poem 27.

_keel_: skim.


Poem 29.

_expense_: waste.


Poem 30.

_Nativity once in the main of light_: when a star has risen and entered
on the full stream of light;--another of the astrological phrases no
longer familiar.
_Crooked eclipses_: as coming athwart the Sun's apparent course.

Wordsworth, thinking probably of the "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said
finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic; he
would have died of plethora of thought. " This prodigality of nature is
exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given
(which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration
than any other portion of the Editor's task) contains many that will not
be fully felt and understood without some earnestness of thought on the
reader's part. But he is not likely to regret the labour.


Poem 31.

_upon misprision growing_: either, granted in error, or, on the growth
of contempt.


Poem 32.

With the tone of this Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is
not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest
sensitiveness to passion:--hence the attraction he felt in the
contrasting effects of apathy.


Poem 33.

_grame_: sorrow. It was long before English Poetry returned to the
charming simplicity of this and a few other poems by Wyat.


Poem 34.

Pandion in the ancient fable was father to Philomela.


Poem 38.