Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/206

186 to keep company with verses in which Joseph Beaumont inquired—

"Why did perfection seek for parts?                  Why did his nature grace the arts?                   Why strove he both the worlds to know,                   Yet always scorned the world below?                   Why would his brain the centre be                   To learning's circularitie,                   Which, though the vastest arts did fill,                   Would like a point seem little still?"

and Cleveland, the Cavalier satirist, declared that

"I am no poet here; my pen's the spout               Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out            In pity of that name whose fate we see                Thus copied out in grief's hydrographie."

And this was the general style of eulogistic addresses, satires, and religious verse like that of Benlowes. From such contorted thought, and the uncouth ex- pression and versification which went with it, there were two modes of escape. That which Milton took, the way of genius, was not open to all; the other was to attain, even at the cost of imaginative loss, to a poetry of common-sense and clear, balanced, oratorical expression. In this movement towards a poetry of common-sense, satire of current affairs, and pointed, well-balanced eloquence, all good things, but none of them quite compensating for the finer spirit of poetry which they expelled, the writers whom Dryden singled out as his predecessors were Edmund Waller (1606-1687), Sir John Denham (1615-1669), Sir William Davenant (1605-1668), and Abraham Cowley (1618-1667).