We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make
our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then
legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary
expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy,
hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare
occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson's beauty is more
grateful than Tennyson's. It is a natural manly grace of a robust
workman. Ben's flowers are not in pots, at a city florist's ranged
on a flower stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home,
attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and
apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck with
boughs of hemlock and sweet briar, with ferns and pond lilies which
the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our
benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then?
It is long since we have as good a lyrist; it will be long before we
have his superior. "Godiva" is a noble poem that will tell the
legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present
age, for which we predict the longest term, is "Abou ben Adhem" of
Leigh Hunt.
Pages:
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234