This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question;
and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth,
and printed his Book of Airs with Rosseter two years before her
death, it is by no violence that we give him the name that covers
our earlier poets of the great age. When thou must Home is of the
day of Marlowe. It has the qualities of great poetry, and
especially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and it has a
quality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult,
large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous.
THE FUNERAL
Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation
that I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral;
but the earlier lines of the last are fine.
CHARIS' TRIUMPH
The freshest of Ben Jonson's lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it
is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his
emphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice in
verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it
is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country-
phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect
is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault for a
blunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, where
it says the contrary of what it would say -
"But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine;"
and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the
argument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must
hold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line of
it has chanced to get turned in the rhyming.
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