386 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness, 

 In all the bravery my friends could show me, 

 In all the faith my innocence could give me, 

 In the best language my true tongue could tell me, 

 And in the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, 

 I sued and served. 



The sweetness of these passages, none of which are 

 singular, or such as may not be easily matched with scores 

 of equal passages from the same and other playwrights, is 

 like the sweetness of honey distilling from the honeycomb. 

 It falls unsought and unpremeditated with the perfume of 

 wilding flowers. Nay more, like honey from the jaws of 

 Samson's lion, we feel it to be ex forti dulcedo, the sweetness 

 of strength. 



When we turn to the sweetness of Victorian poetry, we 

 rarely find exactly the same quality. In Keats it is over- 

 loaded ; in Coleridge it is sultry ; in William Morris it is 

 cloying ; in Swinburne it is inebriating ; in Shelley it is 

 volatilised ; in Wordsworth it is somewhat thin and arid ; 

 in Tennyson it is sumptuous ; in Rossetti it is powerfully 

 perfumed. We have exchanged the hedgerow flowers for 

 heavy-headed double roses, and instead of honey we are 

 not unfrequently reminded pardon the expression of jam. 

 Poets who, by happy accident or deliberate enthusiasm, have 

 at some moment come nearest to the Elizabethan simplicity 

 and liquidity of utterance, catch this honeyed sweetness best. 

 We feel that Browning caught it when he wrote : 



A footfaU there 



Suffices to upturn to the warm air 

 Half -germinating spices ; mere decay 

 Produces richer life, and day by day 

 New pollen on the lily petal grows, 

 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose. 



Tennyson produced something different when he wrote that 

 musical idyll * Come down, maid, from yonder mountain 

 height,' which closes upon two incomparable lines of linked 

 melody long drawn out : 



