Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/15

of inspiration or of luck, It is 'above all strangeness' that a man labouring under this habitual disqualification should have been competent to recognize with accurate and delicate discernment an occasion on which he had for once risen above his usual capacity—a shot by which he had actually hit the white: but the lyrical verses which Ben Jonson quoted to Drummond as his best have exactly the quality which lyrical verse ought to have and which their author's lyrical verse almost invariably misses; the note of apparently spontaneous, inevitable, irrepressible and impeccable music. They might have been written by Coleridge or Shelley. But Ben, as a rule,—a rule which is proved by the exception—was one of the singers who could not sing; though, like Dryden, he could intone most admirably; which is more—and much more—than can truthfully be said for Byron. He, however, as well as Dryden, has one example of lyrical success to show for himself, as exceptional and as unmistakable as Jonson's. The incantation in Œdipus, brief as it is, and the first four stanzas of the incantation in Manfred, imitative as they are, reveal a momentary sense of music, a momentary command of the instrument employed, no less singular and no less absolute.