As in the German legend the
little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat
himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if
the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own
shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that
Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit,
without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions
with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish
limits of his generation. In the prologue to his "Masque at Court" he has
unconsciously defined his own poetry:--
"Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,
But tender passions, motions soft and grave,
The still spectator must expect to have."
And indeed his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary associations
and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry,
but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current
and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem,
blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the
Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's _Integer
Vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the
compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original.
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