recognition which is
his due, but has failed almost entirely to receive any recognition
whatever. If his name is known at all, it is known in virtue of the one
or two of his lyrics which have crept into some of the current
anthologies. But Beddoes' highest claim to distinction does not rest
upon his lyrical achievements, consummate as those achievements are; it
rests upon his extraordinary eminence as a master of dramatic blank
verse. Perhaps his greatest misfortune was that he was born at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and not at the end of the
sixteenth. His proper place was among that noble band of Elizabethans,
whose strong and splendid spirit gave to England, in one miraculous
generation, the most glorious heritage of drama that the world has
known. If Charles Lamb had discovered his tragedies among the folios of
the British Museum, and had given extracts from them in the _Specimens
of Dramatic Poets_, Beddoes' name would doubtless be as familiar to us
now as those of Marlowe and Webster, Fletcher and Ford. As it happened,
however, he came as a strange and isolated phenomenon, a star which had
wandered from its constellation, and was lost among alien lights. It is
to very little purpose that Mr. Ramsay Colles, his latest editor,
assures us that 'Beddoes is interesting as marking the transition from
Shelley to Browning'; it is to still less purpose that he points out to
us a passage in _Death's Jest Book_ which anticipates the doctrines of
_The Descent of Man._ For Beddoes cannot be hoisted into line with his
contemporaries by such methods as these; nor is it in the light of such
after-considerations that the value of his work must be judged. We must
take him on his own merits, 'unmixed with seconds'; we must discover and
appraise his peculiar quality for its own sake.

He hath skill in language;
And knowledge is in him, root, flower, and fruit,
A palm with winged imagination in it,
Whose roots stretch even underneath the grave;
And on them hangs a lamp of magic science
In his soul's deepest mine, where folded thoughts
Lie sleeping on the tombs of magi dead.

If the neglect suffered by Beddoes' poetry may be accounted for in more
ways than one, it is not so easy to understand why more curiosity has
never been aroused by the circumstances of his life. For one reader who
cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing
there are a thousand who are