Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No? No?

Then will I headlong run into the earth.

Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me!

Ah! half the hour is past; 't will all be past anon.
O God,

If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet, for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years —

and at last be saved!

Oh, no end 's limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why was this immortal that thou hast ?
Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell!
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven.
Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell.
O soul, be changed to little waterdrops
And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books.

Ah, Mephistophilis!'

It remains to say a few words of Marlowe's poem of "Hero and Leander," for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes

somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope's cadence: —

"Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,

By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn."

It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his "Endymion." A single passage will serve to prove

this:

"So fair a church as this had Venus none :
The walls were of discolored jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other wine from grapes outwrung."

Here are

Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of those long sequences of musical proper names of which he made such effective use. two passages which Milton surely had read and pondered:

"So from the East unto the furthest West

Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm;
The galleys and those pilling brigantines
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf,

And hover in the straits for Christians' wreck,

Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,

Until the Persian fleet and men of war

Sailing along the Oriental sea

Have fetched about the Indian continent,

Even from Persepolis to Mexico,

And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar."

This is still more Miltonic:

"As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingèd steeds,

All fearful folds his sails and sounds the main."

Spenser, too, loved this luxury of sound, as he shows in such passages as this:

"Now was Aldebaran uplifted high

Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair."

And I fancy he would have put him there to make music, even had it been astronomically impossible, but he never strung such names in long necklaces, as Marlowe and Milton were fond of doing.

Was Marlowe, then, a great poet? For such a title he had hardly range enough of power, hardly reach enough of thought. But surely he had some of the finest qualities that go to the making of a great poet; and his poetic instinct, when he had time to give himself wholly over to its guidance, was unerring. I say when he had time enough, for he, too, like his fellows, was forced to make the daily task bring in the daily bread. We have seen how fruitful his influence has been, and perhaps his genius could have no surer warrant than that the charm of it lingered in the memory of poets, for theirs is the memory of mankind. If we allow him genius, what need to ask for more? And perhaps it would be only to him among the group of dramatists who surrounded Shakespeare that we should allow it. He was the herald that dropped dead in announcing the victory in whose fruits he was not to share.

III

WEBSTER

IN In my first lecture I spoke briefly of the deficiency in respect of Form which characterizes nearly all the dramatic literature of which we are taking a summary survey, till the example of Shakespeare and the precepts of Ben Jonson wrought their natural effect. Teleology, or the argument from means to end, the argument of adaptation, is not so much in fashion in some spheres of thought and speculation as it once was, but here it applies admirably. We have a piece of work, and we know the maker of it. The next question that we ask ourselves is the

natural one very

how far it shows

marks of intelligent design. In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead, by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow, and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse towards the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical, with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another. It is in the former sense alone that any production can be called a work of art.

And when we apply the word Form in this sense to some creation of the mind, we imply that there

is a life, or, what is still better, a soul in it. That there is an intimate relation, or, at any rate, a close analogy, between Form in this its highest attribute and Imagination, is evident if we remember that the Imagination is the shaping faculty. This is, indeed, its preeminent function, to which all others are subsidiary. Shakespeare, with his usual depth of insight and the precision that comes of it, tells us that "imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown." In his maturer creations there is generally some central thought about which the action revolves like a moon, carried along with it in its appointed orbit, and permitted the gambol of a Ptolemaic epicycle now and then. But the word Form has also more limited applications, as, for example, when we use it to imply that nice sense of proportion and adaptation which results in Style. We may apply it even to the structure of a verse, or of a short poem in which every advantage has been taken of the material employed, as in Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," which seems as perfect in its outline as the thing it so lovingly celebrates. In all these cases there often seems also to be something intuitive or instinctive in the working of certain faculties of the poet, and to this we unconsciously testify when we call it genius. But in the technic of this art, perfection can be reached only by long training, as was evident in the case of Coleridge. Of course, without the genius all the training in the world will produce only a mechanical and lifeless result; but even if the genius is there, there is nothing too seemingly trifling to deserve