They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful poets of Elizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity has seen proper to admit the claim in more instances than might well have been expected.
But the delightful part of _The Shepherd's Hunting_ has yet to come. With the fourth "eglogue" the caged bird begins to sing like a lark at Heaven's gate, and it is the prisoned man--who ought to be in doleful dumps--that rallies his free friend Browne on his low spirits. It is time, he says, to be merry:
_Coridon, with his bold rout, Hath already been about, For the elder shepherds' dole, And fetched in the summer pole; Whilst the rest have built a bower To defend them from a shower, Sealed so close, with boughs all green, Titan cannot pry between; Now the dairy-wenches dream Of their strawberries and cream, And each doth herself advance, To be taken in to dance_.
What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hot and putrid Marshalsea! They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch. But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings; he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget's iron bars. There are those who "my Music do contemn," who will none of the poetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless for him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the
_Cups of turnèd maple-root, Whereupon the skilful man Hath engraved the Loves of Pan_,
or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue," if those base clowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Roget instructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a true poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond all racks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do is to despair. He rises to his own greatest and best work in this encouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble verses as these dare question Wither's claim to a _fauteuil_ in the Academy of Parnassus:
_If thy Verse do bravely tower As she makes wing, she gets power, Yet the higher she doth soar, She's affronted still the more; Till she to the highest hath past, Then she rests with Fame at last. Let nought therefore thee affright, But make forward in thy flight; For if I could match thy rhyme To the very stars I'd climb, There begin again, and fly Till I reached Eternity_.