Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/29

 the starry influences stands in the scrapbook on page 235, and in the list of used pages is crossed out. The poem of Du Bartas quoted afterwards does not seem to be in the scrap-book.

Of course, since Thoreau wrote on Ralegh, now more than sixty years, much has been learned and printed concerning his problematical career, which still remains in some points doubtful,—in none more so, perhaps, than in the true authorship of the poems ascribed to him by his contemporaries, and long after by Bishop Percy.

Thoreau seems to have been guided in his judgment of Ralegh as the real author of disputed poems, by his inner consciousness of what the knightly courtier ought to have written. Nor did he live long enough to see the fragments of an undoubted poem by Ralegh, The Continuation of Cynthia, which was found after Thoreau's death among the numerous papers of the Cecils at Hatfield House. In its form it is the poorest of all the verses ascribed to Ralegh; yet it has good lines, and a general air of magnanimous regret. It is a fragment in the unmistakable