He writes, "Sir Walter Raleigh the night before his death." (In some copies thus entitled: "Verses said to have been found in his Bible in the Gatehouse at Westminster;" Archbishop Sancroft, who has transcribed the lines, calls them his "Epitaph made by himself, and given to me of him, the night before his suffering.")
The Silent Lover is thought to have been sent to Elizabeth; the Walsingham verses, which Thoreau thought characteristic of Ralegh, do not seem so to me, and Hannah says, "I think it very improbable that Ralegh wrote this ballad." It sounds more like Campion.
As in that chapter of The Service which he has called The Soldier, so in this essay Thoreau shows a decided taste for war as against an inglorious state of peace, and sees little harm in the constant ardor of his hero for a fight against Irish kernes, Spanish warships, and the armies of Austria and Spain, against which he had contended from his warlike youth, when he absented himself from the university to learn the art of war. Although less inclined, as he grew older, to
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