'Not marble, nor the gilded monuments [Elizabethan AGE.]
Of Princes shall outlive this power-ful rhyme.'

[This is our unconscious Poet, who does not know that his poems are worth printing, or that they are going to get printed—who does not know or care whether they are or not.]

'But you shall shine more bright in these contents,
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn [iconoclasm],
And broils [civil war] root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.'

[What is it, then, that this prophet is relying on? Is it a manuscript? Is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in so many, many lyrics? Here, for instance:—]

'His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.'

And here—

'O where, alack!
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O none, unless this miracle [this miracle] have might,
that in black ink—'

Is this printer's ink? Or is it the ink of the prompter's book? or the fading ink of those loose papers, so soon to be 'yellowed with age,' scattered about no one knew where, that some busy-body, who had nothing else to do, might perhaps take it into his head to save?

'O none, unless this miracle'—THIS MIRACLE, the rejoicing scholar and man of letters, who was not for an age, but for all time, cries—defying tyranny, laughing at princes' edicts, reaching into his own great assured futurity across the gulfs of civil war, planting his feet upon that sure ground, and singing songs of triumph over the spent tombs of brass and tyrants' crests; like that orator who was to make an oration in public, and found himself a little straitened in time to fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do, when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word that the audience was deferred till the next day; at which he was so ravished with joy, that he enfranchised him. 'This miracle.' He knows what miracles are, for he has told us; but none other knew what miracle this was that he is celebrating here with all this wealth of symphonies.

'O none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.'