SONNETS. [From Aurora.] I envy not Endymion now no more, Nor all the happiness his sleep did yield, Suck'd from his sleep-seal'd lips balm for her sore: I dreaming did far greater pleasure prove, And I the soul of it, which he did miss. Love swore by Styx, while all the depths did tremble, Thus, thus I see that all must fall in end, That with a greater than themselves contend. FROM THE TRAGEDY OF DARIUS.' Chorus 3. Time, through Jove's judgment just, Huge alteration brings; Those are but fools who trust In transitory things, Whose tails bear mortal stings, What is from ruin free? The elements which be At variance, as we see, Still wrestling at debate, All those through cold and heat How dare vain worldlings vaunt These fearful signs do prove That th' angry powers above Are mov'd to indignation Against this wretched nation, Which they no longer love: What are we but a puff of breath Who live assured of nothing but of death? Who was so happy yet Him, when that least he would; Some heavy plague draws near, Destruction to procure. World's glory is but like a flower, Which both is bloom'd and blasted in an hour. In what we most repose Long time we toil to find Difficult to retain, A dream, a breath, a fume? Which vex them most that them possess, Who starve with store and famish with excess. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. [JOHN FLETCHER was born in December, 1579, at Rye in Sussex, where his father, who ultimately became Bishop of London, was minister. He was admitted pensioner at Benet College, Cambridge, in 1591; and little is known of his life between this date and the period of his connection with Beaumont. FRANCIS BEAUMONT was the son of Sir F. Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, and was born at that place, probably in 1585. He resided for a short time at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, and was entered of the Inner Temple in 1600. Not many years after this we may suppose the friendship between the two poets to have begun. They lived together on the Bank side,' in Southwark, not far from the Play-house' (the Globe), and wrote for the theatre. The most celebrated of their joint productions were produced probably between 1608 and 1611. But the common life which has been described by Aubrey, and is itself almost a poem (if partly a comic one), must have been disturbed in 1613, when Beaumont married. In the spring of 1616 he died. So far as is known, Fletcher remained single till his death, which took place in August, 1625.] Coleridge wished that Beaumont and Fletcher had written poems instead of tragedies. It was a bold wish, though not an unfriendly one; but perhaps we should be readier to echo it if Coleridge had spoken of lyrics rather than of poems generally. The longer poems of Beaumont which remain to us are, on the whole, not remarkable. He composed a free paraphrase of Ovid's Remedia Amoris. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, printed as early as 1602, when he was probably seventeen years old, is noteworthy chiefly on that account. In this poem, written in the same metre as Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and founded on a passage in Ovid's Metamorphoses, there is plenty of luxuriance and facility, but also a superabundance of mere voluptuous description and of frigid conceits. Some of Beaumont's memorial poems are marked by an almost incredible want of taste. But the case is very different with the letter to Ben Jonson, in which 'their merry |