Page:Poet Lore, volume 3, 1891.djvu/74

60 for this we must turn to that astonishingly tender and graceful play "The Sad Shepherd." Like so many other poets who have well-nigh done with this life of ours, Ben Jonson shows here a tender and lingering delight in youth, in flowers, in the joy of lovers. For nearly the full tale of years the poet has been on easy terms with this familiar and home-like world, about to leave his place in it forever, it is natural that he should give a lingering look backward at those vanishing and virginal delights of life which already he sees surrounded with the pathetic illumination of retrospection. He is done with it all like a tale that is told, yet he knows now, as youth itself does not, what a glad thing is abounding strength, and the free sunshine, and the ever-widening horizon, and man's magnificent daring, and the sweetness of woman's love. As we read the opening lines of "The Sad Shepherd" we ask ourselves where are the age, the ache, the penury, the bitter neglect, the ever-thickening shadow of the inevitable end.

In this kindly delight of age in the simple joys of life there is something more than a mere imaginary fellowship, it is the delight of the octogenarian watching with meditative and half-envious sympathy the frolics of a child.

It is just this kindly and reminiscent atmosphere which Professor Edward Dowden finds in the last plays of Shakespeare. Thus he writes:

"Over the beauty of youth and the love of youth there is shed in these plays of Shakespeare's final period a clear yet tender luminousness not elsewhere to be perceived in his writings … There is nothing in the early plays wonderful, strangely beautiful, pathetic about youth, its joys and sorrows. But in these latest plays the