Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/200

170 Browning's "Old Pictures in Florence" is "to show that Greek art in all its matchless perfection is no more admirable than dim and almost undecipherable ruins of efforts merely monastic, on smoke-stained walls of Christian churches." But to me the latter suggest merely faith and aspiration, without that perfected beauty which adds the grandeur of attainment and completes the trinity of art.

The poetry of our own tongue is sufficient to test Beauty of our English poetry. the law of durability. Its youth, as if that of a poet, was pledged to the mastery of the beautiful as soon as it grew out of half-barbaric minstrelsy and displayed a conscious intent. Chaucer is a poet of the beautiful; always original in his genius, and sometimes in his invention, he for the most part simply tells old tales with a new and English beauty. Five hundred years later his pupil, Morris, renews the process. Spenser's rare and exhaustless art makes him a poet for poets. Passing by Shakespeare as we would pass by nature, what we cull again and again from the Elizabethan garden are those passages in the dramatists, beautiful for rhythm and diction, which furnish examples for the criticism of Coleridge and Lamb. From the skylark melodies and madrigals of that English Arcady those which are most beautiful are ever chosen first by the anthologists. We never tire of them: they seem Things "to full perfection brought." more perfect and welcome with each remove. Too few read Ben Jonson's plays; who does not know "To Celia,"