Describing his personal appearance, he says: A sweet, attractive kind of grace, A full assurance given by looks, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of Gospel books!-- I trow, that countenance cannot lie Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.
Was ever eye did see that face, Was ever ear did hear that tongue, Was ever mind did mind his grace That ever thought the travel long?
But eyes and ears, and every thought, Were with his sweet perfections caught.
His _Arcadia_ is a book full of wisdom and beauty.

None of his writings were printed in his lifetime; but the _Arcadia_ was for many years after his death one of the most popular books in the country.

His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh's, being less condensed and stately.

It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his friend Spenser entertained when young; but there is often an exquisite art in his other poems.
The first I shall transcribe is a sonnet, to which the Latin words printed below it might be prefixed as a title: _Splendidis longum valedico nugis._ A LONG FAREWELL TO GLITTERING TRIFLES.
Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust; And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things; Grow rich in that which never taketh rust: What ever fades but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
Oh take fast hold; let that light be thy guide, In this small course which birth draws out to death; And think how evil[63] becometh him to slide Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see: Eternal love, maintain thy life in me.
Before turning to the treasury of his noblest verse, I shall give six lines from a poem in the _Arcadia_--chiefly for the sake of instancing what great questions those mighty men delighted in: What essence destiny hath; if fortune be or no; Whence our immortal souls to mortal earth do stow[64]: What life it is, and how that all these lives do gather, With outward maker's force, or like an inward father.
Such thoughts, me thought, I thought, and strained my single mind, Then void of nearer cares, the depth of things to find.
Lord Bacon was not the only one, in such an age, to think upon the mighty relations of physics and metaphysics, or, as Sidney would say, "of naturall and supernaturall philosophic." For a man to do his best, he must be upheld, even in his speculations, by those around him.
In the specimen just given, we find that our religious poetry has gone down into the deeps.

There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer.