Excerpt from The Cavalier to His Lady: Love-Poems of the 17th Century It will be seen that I have not gone far afield in my gleaning; most of the now famous Elizabethan Lyrics are here, and if I have omitted any such (as certain of Shakespeare's, for instance) it was for lack neither of due consideration nor of appreciation, but because they were adjudged either over-familiar, or outside my time-limit (however elastic and arbitrary), or otherwise inconvenient to my scheme. To many readers well acquainted with the majority of these poems, some, I think, will be new - such as Sedley's Love still has something of the sea and his Phillis is my only joy, wherein the first line of the one should captivate the fancy, and the first line of the other strike familiarly on the ear. At the Worst I must put forward the anthologist's ultimate defence, that I put them in because I like them. A lesser apology will, I h0pe, be required for Wither's sonnet, Now gentle sleep hath closed up those eyes, despite its apparent derivation from the least translatable carmen of Catullus. To the end of Ben Jonson's See the chariot at hand here of love, I have attached Suckling's parody, Hast thou seen the down in the air, which possesses merits quite different from those of its original. A collocation of perhaps greater interest is that of Jonson's song. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.