And all combined in beauty's worthiness, And he was the herald of the king of kings. Marlowe wrote just before and just after the destruction of the Armada. Following that heroic victory we find one of the greatest periods of splendid literature in the history of the world. Inexplicable if he stood alone, as Schlegel has asserted, Shakespeare only becomes of a greater splendour and importance to us when we see him, not as a strange and miraculous isolated figure, but as the greatest of a mighty company of Tragic Poets and Dramatists. Born in 1564 and dead in 1616, within those few years he gave to England the greatest imaginative work of modern times. Born in the depths of that quiet and sober country that was before the foundation of any city, and that might seem to be the peculiar birthright of the English, the vitality and beauty of his early youth remain to us in the sensuous and lovely poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Founded on Italian models they are splendid chiefly with youth. Of the plays, from the early euphuistic Comedies, in which woman is a doll and man too a kind of puppet full of perfect words, to the great series of Histories, the tremendous series of Tragedies, the exquisite and lovely Comedies, in which he seems to have sounded the heights and depths of life on every side, ignoring nothing save the religious temperament, who may now speak well? A whole literature has sprung up round his name, and not least round the Sonnets. A profound pessimism seems at one time to have possessed the greatest spirit of our race, and with a matchless music, following the earliest of our Sonneteers, Surrey, he has told us, with that inscrutable smile that has baffled every inquisitive critic, of his immense sorrow and scorn of a world in which everything was passing away. Perhaps of all his work, the most beautiful, the most perfect part is the Sonnets. How far are we here from the euphuism of Sidney, or any of the great crowd of Sonneteers, or of Shakespeare himself in youth? He seems to have pulled up life by the roots and cast it from him, and, indeed, it was to a kind of solitude almost monastic that he suddenly retired after the production of "The Tempest" in 1613, reconciled at last to a continual silence, allowing life and all the greatness and renown, that he had known and understood, to slip away from him, till he died, a recluse in Stratford, in 1616. Nor was the company he left behind unworthy of him. Less than himself, but only less than he, that crowd of Dramatists, of Poets, led by Ben Jonson, continued the splendid tradition through Beaumont and Fletcher and Ford and Webster and Dekker till it fell into an exquisite decadence and died in Shirley. But the lovely unbroken song of the Lyric Poets had not been interrupted by the great Dramatists, many of whom are among the first Lyric Poets of our land. Shakespeare, in his unapproachable songs and the great overture to "The Two Noble Kinsmen"; Ben Jonson, in many a perfect song; and Campion, in songs of a different manner, less artistically sincere, but most musical and lovely, were, as it were, the leaders of a host of anonymous song writers whose verses, written for the music of the lute or the clavichord, have happily come down to us. A more profound note is touched in so serious and passionate a poet as Donne, of whom Ben Jonson has said "he was the first poet of the world in some things," and, indeed, in a certain magical but less commonplace way he had Wordsworth's gift for "suddenly transfiguring common things by a flood of light". The great Elizabethan age-the age of Shakespeare-may be said to have come to an end with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649), but though the drama of that age certainly died in Shirley, there is no such break in Lyric Poetry, which would appear to have been an unbroken stream, varying, it is true, in depth and volume, from the time of Wyatt to the time of Swinburne. For, born three years after Drummond, we have George Wither, a poet so much better than his reputation, whose one lovely song, "Shall I wasting in despair" is the only verse from his muse generally known to his countrymen, who have forgotten the exquisite poem of "Philarete” which Mr. Arber printed in his English Garner.1 There remain of those poets born in the sixteenth century two disciples of Ben Jonson, the one a very great master of lyrical form, the other one of the greatest lyric poets in the language-Thomas Carew (1589-1639) and Robert Herrick (1594-1674). The immortal poet of that immortal verse "To Meadows' is one of the most delicate glories of our literature. His work is of its kind perfect. One discovers there a dainty and cheerful spirit of pleasure, a certain ritual of life that is exquisite and beautiful in itself no less in his sacred than in his profane verse. With all the passion and beauty of Carew I find him a poet less 1 1 English Garner, 1895, vol. iv., p. 353. great and less perfect than Herrick. He is more sensual, more pagan, and his best poem, "A Rapture," I have omitted, thinking that it might sound strangely in the ears of a generation "whose ears are the chastest part about them". Herrick lived to be eighty years old, and in himself joins the age of Shakespeare to those of Milton and Dryden, dying at last only fourteen years before the birth of Pope. It is strange that in all the hurly-burly of the great Rebellion he, undisturbed by the great questions that were being fought out so desperately in many a tragic field, should in loyal Devon have written his verse almost without a thought of war and published it at last in the very year of the king's murder. Another poet thrown from the seclusion and quiet orderly days of university life was not so fortunate. Perhaps the greatest religious poet in the language, Richard Crashaw, whose unique and lovely poem "Wishes to His Supposed Mistress" is here printed complete, was expelled from Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge by the rebels, dying at last in Italy. His beautiful and passionate work is among the rarest treasures of English poetry. His religious verse, which is by far the larger part of his work, has this almost unique virtue that it is never commonplace, often indeed it rises to the height of great poetry, while Vaughan and Herbert in Wales and at Oxford and Bemerton sang very sweetly of immortal things, but without the passion or the strength of Crashaw. But it was the age of Milton and Cromwell and we expelled our greatest religious poet from our shores. Of Milton's work nothing is given in this collection. Since I had forbidden myself extracts of any sort there was really nothing to give. One of the great poets of the world, Milton was, owing perhaps, at least in part, to the troublous times, to his own misfortunes, to his blindness, as unamiable a man as ever lived. He seems to have loved no woman wedded as he was to the Great Republic. His indestructible monument of verse, almost flawless, remains one of the greater glories of our literature for the most part, as I believe, unread. And thinking of the cold, pure outlines of his work it is strange to come upon the verse, absolutely contemporary, of such poets as Suckling (16081642) and Lovelace (1618-1658). Suckling was the greater poet; possibly he took more trouble with his verses than Lovelace did; but it would seem that in spite of the artificiality of his work, Lovelace was at least the passionate lover of Althea, "driven," as Mr. Saintsbury reminds us, " to something very like despair for the loss of his Mistress". Of the Suckling poems given in this volume none is I suppose strictly a love poem, and yet in their way they are so characteristic that since they deal with love such as it is, not Dante's Lord of terrible aspect, but something at least a little more interesting than the domestic musings of Cowper, I could not leave them out. There remains a poet born ten years before Dryden, almost unread, and yet, as I think, one of the greatest poets of that age, Andrew Marvell. What reverence you find in his work for the old great masters, what order, what sweetness, and a suggestion of I know not what precise and comely days! The poem "To His Coy Mistress" is surely one of the very rarest things in our literature unforgetable and profoundly passionate. With him the poets of the time of the wars and the Commonwealth come to an end, suggesting in a certain sweeter way than really |