Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/88

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS to a few of those whose reputation has been won by life-long devotion to their art, yet of whose respective productions some one piece has, in each instance, gained the world's ear, and often to the neglect of other excellent works. The poems hitherto considered are more widely known than their authors; while to name a poet of the class to which I now allude, is to start in the mind the key-measure of his representative poem. Examples of this effect are always numerous, and especially in present remembrance of the poets who wrote long ago—Time so winnows out and sets apart the general choice, whether it be such coarse healthful grain as that from which jovial Bishop Still brewed his "Good Ale"—

or the golden barley on which singing birds like Thomas Lodge and Sir Henry Wotton had fed, ere they warbled such dainty lyrics as "Love in my bosom like a Bee," and "You meaner beauties of the night." These two, and many another canticle of their period, you can find in R. H. Stoddard's most choice selection of English Melodies and Madrigals. Are James Shirley and Edmund Waller popularly remembered by single lyrics? Nearly so, for in the one case the two stanzas of Shirley's "Victorious Men of Earth," with the alteration of a couplet, would be in the stately [74]