In spite of the difficulties of distance, he managed to keep abreast of the thought of literary London, the London of Drayton and Webster, of Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. His chief satisfaction was to know that his own work was not unacceptable to this brilliant group, and one of the great pleasures of his life was a visit from Ben Jonson, who, making a walking tour to Scotland, found at Hawthornden that congenial hospitality in which his soul delighted. Of this famous visit, as of other important events, Drummond kept a record, in which he set down his guest's behavior, opinions, and confidential sayings. Warmly as he admired Jonson's genius, he found his personality oppressive, and intrusted his criticisms to his diary. When this was published, more than a century later, the gentle Scot was accused of bad taste, breach of confidence, and disloyalty to friendship. But his defense lies in the fact that the book was meant for no eyes but his own, and that the intimacy and candor of its revelations were intended to preserve his recollections of a memorable experience.
If his environment was not entirely favorable to literary excellences, it is yet very likely that Drummond developed the full measure of his gift. He expressed the spirit of the more imaginative generation which succeeded a hard and fettered predecessor, and it is for this that literature owes him its peculiar debt.
His career began in his twenty-ninth year with the publication of an elegy on the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, eldest son of James I. This poem, under the title 'Tears on the Death of Moeliades,' appeared in 1613, and reached a third edition within a twelvemonth. Its two hundred lines show the finished versification of the scholar, with much poetic grace. It was a product of the Spenserian school, and emphasized the fact that the representative literature of the land had abandoned the Scottish dialect for English forms. Drummond's second volume of poems commemorated the death of his wife and his love of her. It is in this work that the ultimate mood of the poet appears. Much beauty of form, a delightful sensitiveness to nature, a luxuriance of color, and a finely tempered thoughtfulness pervade the poems. His next production, celebrating the visit of James I. to his native land, was entitled 'Forth Feasting,' and represented the Forth and all its borders as rejoicing in the presence of their King. To the reader of to-day the panegyric sounds fulsome and the poetry stilted, and the once famous book has now merely an archaic interest.
Drummond's reputation is based upon the 'Poems,' and upon the Jeremy-Taylor-like 'Cypress Grove,' published in 1623 in connection with the religious verses called 'Flowers of Sion.' 'Cypress Grove' is an essay on death, akin in spirit to the religious temper of the Middle Ages, and in philosophic breadth to the diviner mood of Plato. Only a mind of a high order would have conceived so beautiful and lofty a meditation on the Final Mystery. This brief essay marks the utmost reach of Drummond's mind, and shows the strength of that serene spirituality, which could thus hold its way undisturbed by the sectarian bitterness that fixed a great gulf between England and Scotland. 'The History of the Five Jameses,' which Drummond was ten years in compiling and which was not published until six years after his death, added nothing to his reputation. It lacked alike the diligent minuteness of the chronicler and the broader view of the historian. Many minor papers on the state of religion and politics, chief of which is the political tract 'Irene,' show Drummond's aggressive interest in contemporary affairs. It is not generally known that this gentle scholar was also an inventor of military engines. In 1626 Charles I. engaged him to produce sixteen machines and "not a few inventions besides." The biographers have remained curiously ignorant of this phase of his activity, but the State papers show that the King named him "our faithful subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden." He died in 1649, his death being hastened, it was said, by his passion of grief over the martyrdom of King Charles.
SEXTAIN
The heaven doth not contain so many stars,
So many leaves not prostrate lie in woods
When autumn's old and Boreas sounds his wars,
So many waves have not the ocean floods,
As my rent mind hath torments all the night,
And heart spends sighs when Phoebus brings the light.
Why should I have been partner of the light,
Who, crost in birth by bad aspéct of stars,
Have never since had happy day or night?
Why was not I a liver in the woods,
Or citizen of Thetis's crystal floods,
Than made a man, for love and fortune's wars?
I look each day when death should end the wars,
Uncivil wars, 'twixt sense and reason's light;
My pains I count to mountains, meads, and floods,
And of my sorrow partners make the stars;
All desolate I haunt the fearful woods,
When I should give myself to rest at night.
With watchful eyes I ne'er behold the night,
Mother of peace, but ah! to me of wars,
And Cynthia, queen-like, shining through the woods,
When straight those lamps come in my thought, whose light
My judgment dazzled, passing brightest stars,
And then mine eyes en-isle themselves with floods.