Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/30

 handwriting of Ralegh, with all his peculiarities of spelling, such as "soon" for sun, "yearth" for earth, "sythes" for sighs, and "perrellike" for pearl-like. The Cynthia of which it is a continuation is irrecoverably lost, but was mentioned by Spenser in his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, as early as 1593, where he calls Ralegh "the Shepheard of the Ocean," and says,—

That, of course, must have been written some time after 1592; the continuation is believed by Archdeacon Hannah to have been written soon after the death of Elizabeth (his Cynthia) and during his own early imprisonment in the Tower. Thoreau's favorite among Ralegh's poems was The Lie, or as he preferred to call it, The Soul's Errand, which was long disputed as Ralegh's, but is now certainly known to be his, by the direct testimony of two contemporary manuscripts, "and the still stronger evidence," says Hannah, "of at least two