deficient in humour and sense of proportion, he would have succeeded
better: as it is, his more directly patriotic pieces are usually the
dullest or longest of his works. He requires, like all other poets, the
impulse of an absolutely personal and individual feeling, a moment of
more intimate sympathy, to rouse him to his heights of song. Thus the
_Ballad of Agincourt_ is on the very theme of all patriotic themes that
most attracted him; Virginian and other Voyages lay very close to his
heart; and in certain sonnets to his lady lies his only imperishable
work. Of sheer melody and power of song he had little, apart from his
themes: he could not have sat down and written a few lark's or
nightingale's notes about nothing as some of his contemporaries were
able to do: he required the stimulus of a subject, and if he were really
moved thereby he beat the music out. Only in one or two of the later
Odes, and in the volumes of 1627 and 1630, does his music ever seem to
flow from him naturally. Akin to this quality of broad and extensive
workmanship, to this faculty of taking a subject and when writing, with
all thought concentrated on it, rather than on the method of writing
about it, is his strange lack of what are usually called 'quotations'.
For this is not only due to the fact that he is little known; there are,
besides, so few detached remarks or aphorisms that are separately
quotable; so few examples of that _curiosa felicitas_ of diction: lines
like these,

Thy Bowe, halfe broke, is peec'd with old desire;
Her Bowe is beauty with ten thousand strings....

are rare enough. Drayton, in fact, comes as near controverting the
statement _Poeta nascitur, non fit_, as any one in English literature:
by diligent toil and earnest desire he won a place for himself in the
second rank of English poets: through love he once set foot in the