Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/113

 on the score of creative power, she gave the gift which from him was all but utterly withheld. And therefore it is that his place is not beside Shakespeare, Milton, or Shelley, but merely above Dryden, Byron, and Crabbe. The verses on Penshurst are among his best, wanting neither in grace of form nor stateliness of sound, if too surely wanting in the indefinable quality of distinction or inspiration: and the farewell to the world has a savour of George Herbert's style about it which suggests that the sacred poet must have been a sometime student of the secular. Beaumont, again, must have taken as a model of his lighter lyric style the bright and ringing verses on the proposition 'that women are but men's shadows.' The opening couplet of the striking address 'to Heaven' has been, it seems to me, misunderstood by Gifford; the meaning is not—'Can I not think of God without its making me melancholy?' but 'Can I not think of God without its being imputed or set down by others to a fit of dejection?' The few sacred poems which open the posthumous collection of his miscellaneous verse are far inferior to the best of Herrick's Noble Numbers; although the second of the three must probably have served the minor poet as an occasional model.