me of love for his country and for his lady. Mr. Courthope has
said that he lacked loftiness and resolution of artistic purpose;
without these, we ask, how could a man, not lavishly dowered with poetry
in his soul, have achieved so much of it? It was his very fixity and
loftiness of purpose, his English stubbornness and doggedness of
resolution that enabled him to surmount so many obstacles of style and
metre, of subject and thought. His two purposes, of glorifying his
mistress and his friends, and of sounding England's glories past and
future, while insisting on the dangers of a present decadence, never
flagged or failed. All his poetry up to 1627 has this object directly or
secondarily; and much after this date. Of the more abstract and
universal aspects of his art he had not much conception; but he caught
eagerly at the fashionable belief in the eternizing power of poetry; and
had it not been that, where his patriotism was uppermost, he was
deficient in humour and sense of proportion, he would have succeeded
better: as it is, his more directly patriotic pieces are usually the
dullest or longest of his works. He requires, like all other poets, the
impulse of an absolutely personal and individual feeling, a moment of
more intimate sympathy, to rouse him to his heights of song. Thus the
_Ballad of Agincourt_ is on the very theme of all patriotic themes that
most attracted him; Virginian and other Voyages lay very close to his
heart; and in certain sonnets to his lady lies his only imperishable
work. Of sheer melody and power of song he had little, apart from his
themes: he could not have sat down and written a few lark's or
nightingale's notes about nothing as some of his contemporaries were
able to do: he required the stimulus of a subject, and if he were really
moved thereby he beat the music out. Only in one or two of the later
Odes, and in the volumes of 1627 and 1630, does his music ever seem to
flow from him naturally. Akin to this quality of broad and extensive
workmanship, to this faculty of taking a subject and when writing, with
all thought concentrated on it, rather than on the method of writing
about it, is his strange lack of what are usually called 'quotations'.
For this is not only due to the fact that he is little known; there are,
besides, so few detached remarks or aphorisms that are separately
quotable; so few examples of that _curiosa felicitas_ of diction: lines
like these,

Thy Bowe, halfe brok