A Monument that will then lasting be
When all her Marble is more dust than she.
That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland. And so far as the elegy proper is concerned,—that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the Countess to her grave,—I fully agree with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event—she was but twenty-seven years old,—but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,—
Ere thou knewest the use of tears
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;
As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,
There were enough to meet thee; and the chief
Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee
Nought but a sacrament of misery.
And then,
Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me!
I know it was the longest life to thee,
That e'er with modesty was call'd a span,
Since the Almighty left to strive with man.
In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great—as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy:
I will not hurt the peace which she should have
By looking longer in her quiet grave,—
the consummation that all his heroines of tortured chastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas, Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions. It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,—