WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 391 



saws, and proverbial hints for conduct, Elizabethan literature 

 abounds. But we do not here meet with poems steeped in a 

 pervading tone of thought thought issuing from the writer's 

 self, shaping his judgments, controlling his sensations, model- 

 ling his language, forcing the reader to sojourn for a season 

 in the brain-wrought palace of his mood. For instance, 

 Shakespeare uttered the surest word of imaginative doubt, of 

 that scepticism which makes man question his own sub- 

 stantiality, when Prospero exclaimed : 



We are such stuff 



As dreams are made of, and our little life 

 Is rounded with a sleep. 



Marston in one phrase expressed man's desire to escape 

 from self, that impossible desire which underlies all reaction 

 against the facts of personal existence : 



Can man by no means creep out of himself, 

 And leave the slough of viperous grief behind ? 



Webster reiterated a dark conviction of man's impotence 

 in lines like these : 



We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and bandied 

 Which way please them. 



Yet neither these nor any other Elizabethan poets elaborated 

 their far-reaching views on life into schemes of versified 

 philosophy. We do not find among them a Shelley or a 

 Thomson. Pungent as the gnomic sentences of that age 

 may be, they have relief and background in a large sane 

 sympathy with man's variety of vital functions. The rapier 

 of penetrative scrutiny is plunged and replunged into the 

 deepest and most sensitive recesses of our being. But the 

 thinker speedily withdraws his weapon, and suffers imagination 

 to play with equal curiosity upon the stuff of action, passion, 

 diurnal interests, the woof of sentient self-satisfied existence. 

 Regarding human nature as a complex whole, those poets 

 seized on its generic aspects and touched each aspect with 

 brief incisive precision. Our poets are apt to concentrate 



