Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at
the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of
the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the
ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew many
languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high seas. In
a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, and his death
at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of romance which had
gathered round his name. His literary exercises were various: in prose
he wrote the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology for Poetry_, the one the
beginning of a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first
of the series of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art
which some of our English poets have left us. To the _Arcadia_ we shall
have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great work, the
sequence of sonnets entitled _Astrophel and Stella_, which concerns us
here. They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux,
sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the
intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry
they mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression of an intimate
and personal experience in English literature, struck off in the white
heat of passion, and though they are coloured at times with that
over-fantastic imagery which is at once a characteristic fault and
excellence of the writing of the time, they never lose the one merit
above all others of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity.
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