He could command the spir'ts up from below,
And bind them strongly till they let him know
All the dread secrets that belong'd them to,
And what they did with whom they had to do."
Drayton believed that in the starry heavens—
"as in an everlasting book
Our ends are written";[1]
and yet he not unnaturally asks,
"Why his true motion keepeth every star,
Yet what they govern so irregular?"[2]
He makes Queen Isabella tell Mortimer[3] that their birth-fixed stars so luckily agree that their "revolution seriously directs our like proceedings to the like effects." We learn that at Mortimer's "deliberate and unusual birth" the heavens were said to have retired in council, and to have endued him with a spirit of insatiable aspiration.[4] Of the happy night when he escaped from the Tower his Love declared,
"Some gentle planet in that hour did reign,
And shall be happy in the birth of men
Which was chief lord of the ascendant then."[5]
It may be new to some, who know well enough that "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera," that when the Creator had determined to destroy the elder world He made the stars His instruments:
"Venus and Mars God put this work upon,
Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction,
I th'tail of Cancer, inundations threat,
Luna disposed generally to wet.
The Hiades and Pleiades put too
Their helps; Orion doth what he can do.
No star so small, but some one drop let down,
And all conspire the wicked world to drown:
On the wide heaven there was not any sign,
To watry Pisces but it doth incline."[6]
- ↑ Elegy on the Three Sons of Lord Sheffield drowned in Humber [iv. 1244].
- ↑ The Barons' Wars, book iv. v. 61 [i. 161]. Drayton knew of the saying that the sun dances on Easter morn, and, I think, did not believe in it.—Pol. xxii. [iii. 1091].
- ↑ The Barons' Wars, book iii. v. 53 [i. 139].
- ↑ Ibid. book i. v. 2 [i. 94].
- ↑ Eng. Heroic. Epis. [i. 243].
- ↑ Noah's Flood [iv. 1541, 1512].
