In "Every Man out of his Humor" and "Cynthia's Revels," he is in a raging passion throughout. His verse groans with the weight of his wrath. "My soul," he exclaims,
"Was never ground into such oily colors To flatter vice and daub iniquity. But with an arméd and resolvéd hand I 'll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth, ... and with a whip of steel Print wounding lashes on their iron ribs."
But though he exhausts the whole rhetoric of railing, invective, contempt, and scorn, we yet find it difficult to feel any of the indignation he labors to excite. Admiration, however, cannot be refused to Jonson's prose style in these as in his other plays. It is terse, sharp, swift, biting,--every word a die that stamps its object in a second. Occasionally the author's veins, to use his own apt expression, seem to "run quicksilver," and "every phrase comes forth steeped in the very brine of conceit, and sparkles like salt in fire." Yet, though we have whole scenes in which there is brightness in every sentence, the result of the whole is something like dulness, as the object of the whole is to exalt himself and depress others. But in these plays, in strange contrast with their general character, we have a few specimens of that sweetness of sentiment, refinement of fancy, and indefinite beauty of imagination, which, occupying some secluded corner of his large brain, seemed to exist apart from his ordinary powers and passions. Among these, the most exquisite is this Hymn to Diana, which partakes of the serenity of the moonlight, whose goddess it invokes.
"Queen and huntress chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep. Hesperus entreats thy light, Goddess excellently bright!
"Earth, let not thy envious shade Dare itself to interpose; Cynthia's shining orb was made Heaven to clear when day did close. Bless us, then, with wishéd sight, Goddess excellently bright.
"Lay thy bow of pearl apart, And thy crystal-gleaming quiver; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe how short soever,-- Thou that mak'st a day of night, Goddess excellently bright."
If, as Jonson's adversaries maliciously asserted, "every line of his poetry cost him a cup of sack," we must, even in our more temperate days, pardon him the eighteen cups which, in this melodious lyric, went into his mouth as sack, but, by some precious chemistry, came out through his pen as pearls.