Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/42

28 world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her inspiration never failed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life. Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it is in ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use.

To every man it happens that at one time of his life—for a space of years or for a space of months—he is convinced of death with an incomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living the life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death was as often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands, but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts. The discovery of death did not shake the poets from their composure. On the contrary, the verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in honour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn; but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are infinitely noble. These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by law and