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54

Give me but this ribbon bound

Take all the rest the sun goes round."

Here we have the prototype of that other and more familiar cincture which clasped the Miller's Daughter; and it must be admitted that Lord Tennyson's maiden, with her curls, and her jeweled ear-rings, and the necklace rising and falling all day long upon her "balmy bosom," is more suggestive of a court beauty, like the fair Sacharissa, than of a buxom village girl.

The most impersonal, however, of all the poet-lovers is Sir Philip Sidney, who, in the hundred and eight sonnets dedicated to Stella, has managed to tell us absolutely nothing about her. The atmosphere of haunting individuality which gives these sonnets their half-bitter flavor, and which made them a living power in the stormy days of Elizabethan poetry, reveals to us, not Stella, but Astrophel; not Penelope Devereux, but Sidney himself, bruised by regrets and resentful of his fate. They are not by any means passionate love-songs; they are not even sanguine enough to be persuasive; they are steeped throughout in a pungent melancholy, too