No doubt
all the great poets have now and then broken forth in lyrical jubilation.
Ponderous Ben Jonson himself, when he takes to song, will sing in the joy
of the very sound; but great men have always so much graver work to do,
that they comparatively seldom indulge in this kind of melody. Drummond
excels in madrigals, or canzonets--baby-odes or songs--which have more of
wing and less of thought than sonnets. Through the greater part of his
verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that
ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from
the rain-shower,--never does break out clear, but remains a suggested,
etherially vanishing tone. His is a _voix voilee_, or veiled voice of
song. It is true that in the time we are now approaching far more
attention was paid not merely to the smoothness but to the melody of
verse than any except the great masters had paid before; but some are at
the door, who, not being great masters, yet do their inferior part nearly
as well as they their higher, uttering a music of marvellous and
individual sweetness, which no mere musical care could secure, but which
springs essentially from music in the thought gathering to itself musical
words in melodious division, and thus fashioning for itself a fitting
body. The melody of their verse is all their own--as original as the
greatest art-forms of the masters.
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