That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the _Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland_. And so far as the elegy proper is concerned,--that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the Countess to her grave,--I fully agree with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event--she was but twenty-seven years old,--but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,-- Ere thou knewest the use of tears Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years; sorrow in her wedded life,-- As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief, There were enough to meet thee; and the chief Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee Nought but a sacrament of misery. And then, Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me! I know it was the longest life to thee, That e'er with modesty was call'd a span, Since the Almighty left to strive with man. In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great--as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy: I will not hurt the peace which she should have By looking longer in her quiet grave,-- the consummation that all his heroines of tortured chastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas, Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions. It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,-- Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse; and "Thou art gone,"-- Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we May call that back again as soon as thee.