“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
* * * * *
Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena:
* * * * *
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”

No such verses had ever been heard on the English stage before, and this was one of the great debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. The last scene of the play, in which the bond with Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of Faust’s eddying thought, and seems to writhe and gasp in that agony of hopeless despair:—

“Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop; ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on Him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ’T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No? No?
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me!
* * * * *
Ah! half the hour is past; ’t will all be past anon.
O God,
If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet, for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years—
A hundred thousand—and at last be saved!
Oh, no end’s limited to damnèd souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why was this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell!
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven.
Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell.
O soul, be changed to little waterdrops
And fall into the ocean; ne’er be found!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!”

It remains to say a few words of Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,” for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope’s cadence:—

“Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,
By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn.”

It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his “Endymion.” A single passage will serve to prove this:—

“So fair a church as this had Venus none:
The walls were of discolored jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other wine from grapes outwrung.”

Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of those long sequences of musical proper names of which he made such effective use. Here are two passages which Milton surely had read and pondered:—

“So from the East unto the furthest West
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm;
The galleys and those pilling brigantines
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf,
And hover in the straits for Christians’ wreck,
Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,
Until the Persian fleet and men of war
Sailing along the Oriental sea
Have fetched about the Indian continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar.”

This is still more Miltonic:—

“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingèd steeds,
* * * * *
All fearful folds his sails and sounds the main.”

Spenser, too, loved this luxury of sound, as he shows in such passages as this:—

“Now was Aldebaran uplifted high
Above the starry Cassiopeia’s chair.”

And I fancy he would have put him there to make music, even had it been astronomically impossible, but he never strung such names in long necklaces, as Marlowe and Milton were fond of doing.

Was Marlowe, then, a great poet? For such a title he had hardly range enough of power, hardly reach enough of thought. But surely he had some of the finest qualities that go to the making of a great poet; and his poetic instinct, when he had time to give himself wholly over to its guidance, was unerring. I say when he had time enough, for he, too, like his fellows, was forced to make the daily task bring in the daily bread. We have seen how fruitful his influence has been, and perhaps his genius could have no surer warrant than that the charm of it lingered in the memory of poets, for theirs is the memory of mankind. If we allow him genius, what need to ask for more? And perhaps it would be only to him among the group of dramatists who surrounded Shakespeare that we should allow it. He was the herald that dropped dead in announcing the victory in whose fruits he was not to share.