I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!”
It remains to say a few words of Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,” for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope’s cadence:—
“Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,
By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn.”
It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his “Endymion.” A single passage will serve to prove this:—
“So fair a church as this had Venus none:
The walls were of discolored jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,