“Unwedded maids Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of Love.” This from “Tamburlaine” is particularly characteristic:-- “Nature Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Will us to wear ourselves and never rest Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.” One of these verses reminds us of that exquisite one of Shakespeare where he says that Love is “Still climbing trees in the Hesperides.” But Shakespeare puts a complexity of meaning into his chance sayings, and lures the fancy to excursions of which Marlowe never dreamt. But, alas, a voice will not illustrate like a stereopticon, and this tearing away of fragments that seem to bleed with the avulsion is like breaking off a finger from a statue as a specimen. The impression he made upon the men of his time was uniform; it was that of something new and strange; it was that of genius, in short. Drayton says of him, kindling to an unwonted warmth, as if he loosened himself for a moment from the choking coils of his Polyolbion for a larger breath:-- “Next Marlowe bathèd in the Thespian springs Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clear; For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.” And Chapman, taking up and continuing Marlowe’s half-told story of Hero and Leander, breaks forth suddenly into this enthusiasm of invocation:-- “Then, ho! most strangely intellectual fire That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire Her burning faculties, and with the wings Of thy unsphered flame visit’st the springs Of spirits immortal, now (as swift as Time Doth follow motion) find the eternal clime Of his free soul whose living subject stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.” Surely Chapman would have sent his soul on no such errand had he believed that the soul of Marlowe was in torment, as his accusers did not scruple to say that it was, sent thither by the manifestly Divine judgment of his violent death.