Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/66

 just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the colour of tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was to put to so deeply different an use.

Walking in a valley greene, Spred with Flora summer queene: Where shee heaping all hir graces, Niggard seem'd in other places: Spring it was, and here did spring All that nature forth can bring. (Tullies Loue, p. 53, ed. 1589.)

Nights were short, and daies were long; Blossoms on the Hauthorns hung: Philomele (Night-Musiques King) Tolde the comming of the spring. (Grosart's Barnfield [1876], p. 97.)