is that of a rippling stream, whereas in his earlier days he spoke
weightier and more sonorous words, with a mouth of gold.[24]

To estimate the poetical faculty of Drayton is a somewhat perplexing
task; for, while rarely subtle, or rising to empyrean heights, he wrote
in such varied styles, on such various themes, that the task, at first,
seems that of criticizing many poets, not one. But through all his work
runs the same eminently English spirit, the same honesty and clearness
of idea, the same stolidity of purpose, and not infrequently of
execution also; the same enthusiasm characterizes all his earlier, and
much of his later work; the enthusiasm especially characteristic of
Elizabethan England, and shown by Drayton in his passion for England and
the English, in his triumphant joy in their splendid past, and his
certainty of their future glory. As a poet, he lacked imagination and
fine fury; he supplied their place by the airiest and clearest of
fancies, by the strenuous labour of a great brain illumined by the
steady flame of love for his country and for his lady. Mr. Courthope has
said that he lacked loftiness and resolution of artistic purpose;
without these, we ask, how could a man, not lavishly dowered with poetry
in his soul, have achieved so much of it? It was his very fixity and
loftiness of purpose, his English stubbornness and doggedness of
resolution that enabled him to surmount so many obstacles of style and
metre, of subject and thought. His two purposes, of glorifying his
mistress and his friends, and of sounding England's glories past and
future, while insisting on the dangers of a present decadence, never
flagged or failed. All his poetry up to 1627 has this object directly or
secondarily; and much after this date. Of the more abstract and
universal aspects of his art he had not much conception; but he caught
eagerly at the fashionable belief in the eternizing power of poetry; and
had it not been that, where his patriotism was uppermost, he was