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season to return to Scotland. Instead the bridal party traversed some three hundred miles of Norwegian and Swedish forests, "throw manie woods and wildernes in confermed frost and snaw" (Melville's Diary, Bann. Club, p. 186), crossed the Sund to Elsinore, and spent the remainder of the winter at Kronberg and Copenhagen. "Drinking and driving ou'r " (Letter James to Lord Spynie, Letters to James VI, Bann. Club, p. xix) was varied by visits to Hemingsen, the theologian, and Brahe, the astronomer. On May 1, James and his sixteen-year-old Queen landed at Leith and were escorted in triumph to Holyrood.
As has been said, most of the poems in the Amatoria were written during this exciting period, either before or soon after the King's departure for Denmark. The exact dates of their composition, though indicated so far as possible in the notes following, are not so significant as the evidence of their sincerity and of their connection with an actual episode in the King's life.
I
In this instance the date is fixed by the fact that the news of the storm reached Scotland, September 15, 1589. The English poet Henry Constable, who was in Scotland at the time (cf. Introd., p. xxxvi), wrote a sonnet in answer, "To the King of Scots, upon occasion of a Sonnet the King wrote in complaint of a contrarie [wind] which hindred the arrival of the Queene out of Denmark." (Diana: The Sonnets and Other Poems of Henry Constable, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1859.) The first four lines are as follows:—
"If I durst sigh still as I had begun,
Or durst shed teares in such abundant store,
You should have need to blame the sea no more,
Nor call upon the wind as you have done."
II.
4. Cataplasme. A plaster or poultice. Cf. Montgomerie, Misc. Poems, VI, 1. n :
"No cataplasm can weill impesh that pest."
