“For these my unbaptizèd rhymes
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,
For every sentence, clause, and word
That’s not inlaid with thee, O Lord;
Forgive me, God, and blot each line
Out of my book, that is not thine!”
Revolutionary Times.
I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories.
The writers of this particular period—some of whom I have named—fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.[43] The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit; humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration.
Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, minstrelsy, wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering support of great tranquillity and great national pride. In the days when the Armada was crushed, when British ships and British navigators brought every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to England’s great Virgin Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity; the fever of Puritans against Anglicans, of Independents against Monarchy Men, is raging through all the land; pride in the kingship of such as James I. had broken down; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles I. has broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny gleams of poesy break in.