livre iv

. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. ('Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core') is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson's _Tears of Fancie_, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resemble Shakespeare's pair); Drayton's _Idea_, xxxiii.; Barnes's _Parthenophe and Parthenophil_, xx., and Constable's _Diana_, vi. 7.

{113b} The Greek epigram is in _Palatine Anthology_, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in _Selecta Epigrammata_, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love's torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher's _Licia_, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet's Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that 'she touched the water and it burnt with Love,' but also

Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss Which all diseases quickly can remove.

Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the 'cool well' into which Cupid's torch had fallen 'from Love's fire took heat perpetual,' but also that it grew 'a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.'

{114a} In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar's _Olympic Odes_, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk's _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, _De Senectute_, c. 207; in Horace's _Odes_, iii. 30; in Virgil's _Georgics_, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard's Ode (