Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/171

Rh especially indebted, not only for love-sonnets as "Sleep, silence child, sweet father of soft rest" and "Alexis here she stayed," but for many grave moral and religious sonnets as "Of this fair volume which we world do name," "Run, shepherds, run where Bethlem blest appears," and "Thrice happy he who by some shady grove." Even where he does not translate he imitates Marino in his choice of subject; and the evolution and movement of his sonnets recall the Italian, especially in the effective close, the powerful reflux of the closing triad. Thus the last lines of what is perhaps Drummond's finest sonnet, "The Baptist,"—

"Who listened to his voice, obeyed his cry?         Only the echoes which he made relent,          Rung from their flinty caves, 'Repent!  Repent!'"—

are very similar to the close of Marino's pastoral sonnet on Polyphemus' despair—

"Piu non diss' egli: e'l monte arsiccio e scabro            Rimbombò d'urli, e'l lido e la campagna             Tremonne, e l'altro del Tartareo fabro."

But though Drummond, like other sonneteers, translated and imitated, he had, like the best of the Elizabethans, a personality and genius of his own. His sonnets, though deficient in the passion of Sidney's and Shakespeare's, have few rivals in sweetness and musical evolution, and not less harmonious are the songs or canzoni in irregular lines. That beginning "Phœbus arise!" in ardour, colour, and music will