THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



is concerned chiefly with the future. Plays like Dekker's 

 Olde Fortunatus show the temper that animates Mar- 

 lowe ; the sober moral is almost forgotten in a maze of 



"^^^ delightful wonders. But it would be wrong to regard 



unchanging .. , . . , , ° , 



themes of ^ great literature as notnmg more than the home and 



poetry. haunt of a thing so evanescent as the spirit of the age. 

 Poetic imagination sits aloof, and studies enduring 

 themes. Thomas Lodge wrote his gentle pastoral 

 romance of Rosalynd on a voyage of discovery and 

 pillage ; George Sandys, being arrived off the coast of 

 Virginia with the colonising expedition that succeeded at 

 last, devoted his spare hours to the translation of Ovid. 

 The New World did not obliterate the Old, and the new 

 discoveries did not monopolise the thought of a century. 



In the case, therefore, of the greatest poet of all, 

 Shakespeare, it is enough if it can be shown that his 

 imagination was alive to this new world of speculation 

 and opportunity. A poet's predilections are often more 

 truly seen in his illustrations and digressions than in 



Raleigh's his choice of subject. Sir Walter Raleigh, for instance, 

 in his long, dreary History of the World is kept far 

 away from almost all that had engaged his active life. 

 But when he is moved to passion, his mind reverts to 

 the sea. The greatest passages of his book deal with 

 death and mutability, and continually illustrate human 

 life from the experience of voyagers. 'When we once 

 come in sight of the port of death, to which all winds 

 drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal anchor, 

 which can never be weighed again, the navigation of 

 this life takes end ; then it is, I say, that our own 

 cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations, formerly 

 beaten from us by our health and felicity) return again, 



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