"
If Jonson, Daniel's rival as maker of masques for the Court, proclaimed
him a good honest man but no poet, Spenser generously said he surpassed
"all that afore him came;" and scarcely one of the more prominent of his
contemporaries failed to address compliments to him. When Daniel was
gentleman extraordinary and groom of the privy chamber to Anne,
Queen-consort to James I., the Queen is said to have been a "favourer
and encourager of his muse;" and his high social position made it easy
for less favoured aspirants to praise him. But the perspective of time
brings a more balanced judgment. While Lowell finds in the fact that
Daniel was held in high esteem by his contemporaries a proof that noble
diction was appreciated then as now, and while he admits that Daniel
refined our tongue, yet he decided that Daniel had the thinking and
languaging parts of a poet's outfit but lacked the higher creative gift.
We shall find Daniel at his best, not when in prosaic soberness he sings
"... the civil wars, tumultuous broils,
And bloody factions of a mighty land."
not when he is framing stilted tragedies with chorus and declamation in
the grand Senecan manner, not in his complimentary addresses to lords,
ladies and royalty, nor in the classic masques and philosophical
dialogue, but in the less ambitious poems of _Delia_ and _Rosamond_,
especially in such a sonnet as "Care-charmer Sleep," where we come more
near to hearing a human heart beat than in any of the others.
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