O take fast hold! let that light be thy guide, In this small course which birth draws out to death, And think how evil becometh him to slide, Who seeketh heaven, and comes from heavenly breath. Then farewell, world, thy uttermost I see, Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.
{ 1} _Edward Wotton_, elder brother of Sir Henry Wotton. He was knighted by Elizabeth in 1592, and made Comptroller of her Household. Observe the playfulness in Sidney’s opening and close of a treatise written throughout in plain, manly English without Euphuism, and strictly reasoned.
{ 2} Here the introduction ends, and the argument begins with its § 1. _Poetry the first Light-giver_.
{ 3} A fable from the “Hetamythium” of Laurentius Abstemius, Professor of Belles Lettres at Urbino, and Librarian to Duke Guido Ubaldo under the Pontificate of Alexander VI. (1492–1503).
{ 4} Pliny says (“Nat. Hist.,” lib. xi., cap. 62) that the young vipers, impatient to be born, break through the side of their mother, and so kill her.
{ 5} § 2. _Borrowed from by Philosophers_.
{ 6} Timæus, the Pythagorean philosopher of Locri, and the Athenian Critias are represented by Plato as having listened to the discourse of Socrates on a Republic. Socrates calls on them to show such a state in action. Critias will tell of the rescue of Europe by the ancient citizens of Attica, 10,000 years before, from an inroad of countless invaders who came from the vast island of Atlantis, in the Western Ocean; a struggle of which record was preserved in the temple of Naith or Athené at Sais, in Egypt, and handed down, through Solon, by family tradition to Critias. But first Timæus agrees to expound the structure of the universe; then Critias, in a piece left unfinished by Plato, proceeds to show an ideal society in action against pressure of a danger that seems irresistible.
{ 9} § 4. _Honoured by the Romans as Sacred and Prophetic_.
{ 10} § 5. _And really sacred and prophetic in the Psalms of David_.
{ 11} § 6. _By the Greeks_, _Poets were honoured with the name of Makers_.
{ 12} _Poetry is the one creative art_. _Astronomers and others repeat what they find_.
{ 15} _Here a Second Part of the Essay begins_.
{ 18} _b._ _Philosophical_, _which is perhaps too imitative_.