392 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



their mind upon one aspect, and to sublimate this into an 

 all-engrossing element, which gives a certain sustained colour 

 to their work. Less rich in gnomic wisdom, they are more 

 potent in the communication of settled moods more ' sicklied 

 o'er with the pale cast of thought.' It follows that while the 

 Elizabethans had nothing of what Goethe called ' lazzaretto 

 poetry,' we have much. The affectations of our age do not 

 run toward verbal euphuism, but toward sickliness of senti- 

 ment and a simulated discontent with the world around us. 

 A man of Mr. Mallock's calibre would not have set society in 

 the sixteenth century at work upon the problem, ' Is life 

 worth living ? ' Schopenhauer and Hartmann could hardly 

 have existed then, and they assuredly would not have 

 found disciples. But in an age which produces essayists and 

 philosophers of this sort, poetry cannot fail to be introspective 

 and tinged with morbidity. Fortunately, though this is so, 

 few verses have been written by Englishmen during the 

 nineteenth century of which their authors need repent upon 

 the death-bed. 



IX 



The Elizabethan poets, far more truly than their Italian 

 predecessors, if we except Dante, and more truly than any of 

 their contemporaries in other countries, loved external nature 

 for its own sake. There is hardly any aspect of the visible 

 world, from the flowers of the field to the storm-clouds of 

 the zenith, from the stars in their courses to the moonlight 

 sleeping on a bank, from the embossed foam, covering the sea- 

 verge, to the topless Apennines, which was not seized with 

 fine objective sensibility and illustrated with apt imagery by 

 Shakespeare and his comrades. Yet, keenly appreciative of 

 nature as these poets were, nature remained a background to 

 humanity in all their pictures. Her wonders were treated as 

 adjuncts to man, who moved across the earth and viewed its 

 miracles upon his passage. Therefore, although imaginatively 

 and sympathetically handled, these things were lightly and 

 casually sketched. 



