Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/208

188 periods, was due in great measure to the comparative emptiness of his poetry. He was eminently well qualified "to carve heads on cherry-stones," and with the exception of a few delightful songs—notably On a Girdle and "Go, lovely rose"—and some noble stanzas in the address to Cromwell, it would be difficult to find a thought in his poems fitted to startle or arrest. Dryden's achievement was to give balance and regularity to verse which had the pregnancy and vigour of Jonson's and Donne's.

Denham's "strength" is more dubious than Waller's "sweetness" or "smoothness," and is certainly not of a herculean character. The son of a Lord Chief-Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland, and educated at Oxford, Denham was in close attendance on the King and Queen during the years of trouble; but though made Surveyor of Works after the Restoration, he, like many others, reaped little happiness from his attachment to the House of Stuart. He wrote one worthless play, The Sophy. Of his poems the majority are occasional pieces, of which the most celebrated is the descriptive, moralising Cooper's Hill. The thoughts are prosaic and commonplace, but they are natural and relevant; and the style has some of the easy, pointed eloquence which was to be cultivated in the next age. Four lines added later have become classic—

"O could I flow like thee and make thy stream           My great example as it is my theme!            Tho' deep yet clear, tho' gentle yet not dull,            Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."