The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 · Chapter 75"to a Bird That Haunted the Waters of Lacken in the Winter
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
"By Lord Thurlow
"O melancholy Bird, a winter's day, Thou standest by the margin of the pool, And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school To Patience, which all evil can allay. God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey; And given thyself a lesson to the Fool Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule, And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. There need not schools, nor the Professor's chair, Though these be good, true wisdom to impart. He who has not enough, for these, to spare Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart, And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair: Nature is always wise in every part."
This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney's muse, was a special favourite with Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in his "London Reminiscences," how Lamb used to read it aloud.
Page 248, line 27. Epitaph made on him. After these words, in the London Magazine, came "by Lord Brooke." Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote Sidney's Life, published in 1652. After Sidney's death appeared many elegies upon him, eight of which were printed at the end of Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again, in 1595. That which Lamb quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18 and 26 and 27. The poem beginning "Silence augmenteth grief" is attributed to Brooke, chiefly on Lamb's authority, in Ward's English Poets. This is one stanza:—
He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined, Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ, Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.
Sidney was only thirty-two at his death.
* * * * *
Page 249. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.
Englishman's Magazine, October, 1831, being the second paper under the heading "Peter's Net," of which "Recollections of a Late Royal Academician" was the first (see note, Vol. I.).
The title ran thus:—