He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth.

All that he tells is the fruit of experience, dearly bought: "Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware.
Too long, too long! asleep thou hast me brought, Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare." and earlier in the sequence-- "I now have learned love right and learned even so As those that being poisoned poison know." In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he renounces earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because it fades brings but fading pleasure: "Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see.
Eternal love, maintain thy life in me." The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is certain that like Shakespeare's they were never intended for publication at all.

The point is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but were any vindication needed another more certain might be found.

The _Arcadia_ is strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of the literary imagination.

Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it with those in the romance.
With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly indulged in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund Spenser public life and affairs were subservient to an overmastering poetic impulse.