In bowers of laurel trimly dight, We will outwear the silent night, While Flora busy is to spread Her richest treasure on our bed.
Ten thousand glow−worms shall attend, And all their sparkling lights shall spend. All to adorn and beautify Your lodging with most majesty.
Then in mine arms will I enclose Lily’s fair mixture with the rose; Whose nice perfections in love’s play, Shall tune to me the highest key.
Thus as we pass the welcome night In sportful pleasures and delight, The nimble fairies on the grounds Shall dance and sing melodious sounds.
If these may serve for to entice Your presence to Love’s paradise, Then come with me and be my dear, And we will straight begin the year.
Who will say that this is not equal to the first song ascribed to Marlowe? What couplet in that surpasses this one?:
“Where silver sands and pebbles sing Eternal ditties with the Spring.”
“Ten thousand glow−worms shall attend. And all their sparkling lights shall spend.”
For parallels with the first of these couplets take the following:
“The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes.”
For a single parallel with the second couplet take this:
“Twenty glow−worms shall our lanterns be.”
Similar parallels may be found with other lines of the song. Now are we to believe that Marlowe wrote the first song, and Raleigh the other two signed “Ignoto”? Is it not far more rational and consistent to believe that all three were written by the same pen?
Again, Barnfield has two pieces in the “Helicon,” and the editor ascribes to him another signed “Ignoto”—No. xxi, “As it fell upon a day”—while Allibone, in his Dictionary of Authors, makes him the
author not only of xxi, but of xx—“Come live with me and be my love”—and says that Raleigh’s authorship of “The Nymph’s Reply” is questioned.
Thus Marlowe is robbed of the only piece ascribed to him in the “Helicon,” and Raleigh is left out of it entirely, unless he wrote some other poem signed “Ignoto.”
And by the way, poor neglected Shakspere has but a single specimen there—“On a day, alack a day”— taken from “Love’s Labor Lost.”
But the confusion about “Ignoto” is still more confounded. On page 112 of the “Helicon” is a song entitled “The Shepherd’s Dump,” subscribed “S. E. D.,” supposed to mean Sir Edward Dyer, and on page 224 the same identical song reappears entitled “Thirsis, the Shepherd, to his pipe,” and signed “Ignoto.” The editor of 1812 supposes it was reprinted to make a few corrections in the last stanza; but as the verbal variations in that stanza make it positively worse, it is more likely that the compiler did not notice the repetition, but inadvertently put both in as he found them.