ion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;
all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
humanity before he ever came to understand it.

Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_
Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
which has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ is
perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
of death:

Sleeping, or feigning sleep,
Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb
Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:
'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.

Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.

I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'

If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and