It was an age of personal utterance; and men spoke frankly, without restraint, too nice choosing, or any of the timidities or exaggerations of self-consciousness. The personal utterance might take any form; whether Fulke Greville wrote "treatises" on the mind of man, or Drayton pried into the family affairs of the fairies, or Samuel Daniel thought out sonnets to Delia, or Lodge wantoned in cadences and caprices of the senses. It might seem but to pass on an alien message, in as literal a translation as it could compass of a French or Italian poem. In the hand of a poet two things came into the version: magic, and the personal utterance, if in no other way, through the medium of style. Style, to the poets of the sixteenth century, was much of what went to the making of that broad simplicity, that magnificently obvious eloquence, which seems to us now to have the universal quality of the greatest poetry. The poets of the nineteenth century are no nearer to nature, though they seem more individual because they have made an art of extracting rare emotions, and because they take themselves to pieces more cunningly. Drayton's great sonnet is the epilogue, and Spenser's great poem the epithalamium, for all lovers; but it needs another Shelley to find out love in the labyrinth of "Epipsychidion." All that is greatest in the poetry of the sixteenth century is open to all the world, like a wood, or Arcadia, in which no road is fenced with prohibitions, and the flowers are all for the picking. And when, in the nineteenth century, poetry began again, it was to the poets of the sixteenth century that the new poets looked back, finding the pattern there for what they were making over again for themselves. A few snatches from Elizabethan song-books were enough to direct the first awakenings of song in Blake; Wordsworth found his gnomic and rational style, as of a lofty prose, in Samuel Daniel; Keats rifled the best sweets of Lodge's orchard; and Shelley found in the elegies of Michael Drayton the model of his incomparable style of familiar speech in verse, the style of the _Letter to Maris Gisborne._ Every reader of modern verse will find something contemporary in even the oldest of these poems; partly because modern verse is directly founded on this verse of the sixteenth century, and partly because the greatest poetry is contemporary with all ages. Byron is to be judged by the whole mountainous mass of his world and not by any fragment of colored or glittering spar which one's pick may have extricated from the precipitous hillside. His world is a kind of natural formation, high enough to climb, and wide enough to walk On. There is hard climbing and heavy walking, but, once there, the air braces and the view is wide.