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“But whereas he came planted in the spring,
And had the sun before him of respect;
We, set in th’ autumn, in the withering
And sullen season of a cold defect,
Must taste those sour distastes the times do bring
Upon the fulness of a cloy’d neglect.
Although the stronger constitutions shall
Wear out th’ infection of distemper’d days …”

And so he stood dejected, while the young men of “stronger constitutions” passed him by.

In this way it happened that Daniel, whom at the outset his contemporaries had praised with wide consent, and who never wrote a loose or unscholarly line, came to pen, in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to his tragedy of “Philotas,” these words–perhaps the most pathetic ever uttered by an artist upon his work:

“And therefore since I have outlived the date
Of former grace, acceptance and delight.
I would my lines, late born beyond the fate
Of her[A] spent line, had never come to light;
So had I not been tax’d for wishing well,
Nor now mistaken by the censuring Stage,
Nor in my fame and reputation fell,
Which I esteem more than what all the age
Or the earth can give. But years hath done this wrong,
To make me write too much, and live too long.”

Ease of his verse.

I said just now that Daniel had done much, though quietly, to train the growth of English verse. He not only stood up successfully for its natural development at a time when the clever but less largely informed Campion and others threatened it with fantastic changes. He probably did as much as Waller to introduce polish of line into our poetry. Turn to the famous “Ulysses and the Siren,” and read. Can anyone tell me of English verses that run more smoothly off the tongue, or with a more temperate grace?

“Well, well, Ulysses, then I see
I shall not have thee here:
And, therefore, I will come to thee,
And take my fortune there.
I must be won that cannot win,
Yet lost were I not won;
For beauty hath created been
T’undo or be undone.”

To speak familiarly, this is as easy as an old shoe. To speak yet more familiarly, it looks as if any fool could turn off lines like these. Let the fool try.

And yet to how many anthologies do we not turn in vain for “Ulysses and the Siren”; or for the exquisite spring song, beginning–

“Now each creature joys the other,
Passing happy days and hours;
One bird reports unto another
In the fall of silver showers …”

–or for that lofty thing, the “Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland”?–which Wordsworth, who quoted it in his “Excursion,” declares to be “an admirable picture of the state of a wise man’s mind in a time of public commotion.” Certainly if ever a critic shall arise to deny poetry the virtue we so commonly claim for her, of fortifying men’s souls against calamity, this noble Epistle will be all but the last post from which he will extrude her defenders.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Sc. Elizabeth’s.