Very remarkable verses from a dramatist!  They indicate substratum enough for any art if only the art be there.  Even those who cannot enter into the philosophy of them, which ranks him among the mystics of whom I have yet to speak, will understand a good deal of it symbolically:  for how could he be expected to keep his poetry and his philosophy distinct when of themselves they were so ready to run into one; or in verse to define carefully betwixt degree and kind, when kinds themselves may rise by degrees?  To distinguish without separating; to be able to see that what in their effects upon us are quite different, may yet be a grand flight of ascending steps, “to stop—­no record hath told where,” belongs to the philosopher who is not born mutilated, but is a poet as well.

John Fletcher, likewise a dramatist, the author of the following poem, was two years younger than Ben Jonson.  It is, so far as I am aware, the sole non-dramatic voice he has left behind him.  Its opening is an indignant apostrophe to certain men of pretended science, who in his time were much consulted—­the Astrologers.

  UPON AN HONEST MAN’S FORTUNE.

  You that can look through heaven, and tell the stars;
  Observe their kind conjunctions, and their wars;
  Find out new lights, and give them where you please—­
  To those men honours, pleasures, to those ease;
  You that are God’s surveyors, and can show
  How far, and when, and why the wind doth blow;
  Know all the charges of the dreadful thunder,
  And when it will shoot over, or fall under;
  Tell me—­by all your art I conjure ye—­
  Yes, and by truth—­what shall become of me. 
  Find out my star, if each one, as you say,
  Have his peculiar angel, and his way;
  Observe my fate; next fall into your dreams;
  Sweep clean your houses, and new-line your schemes;[83]
  Then say your worst.  Or have I none at all? 
  Or is it burnt out lately? or did fall? 
  Or am I poor? not able? no full flame? 
  My star, like me, unworthy of a name? 
  Is it your art can only work on those
  That deal with dangers, dignities, and clothes,
  With love, or new opinions?  You all lie: 
  A fishwife hath a fate, and so have I—­
  But far above your finding.  He that gives,
  Out of his providence, to all that lives—­
  And no man knows his treasure, no, not you;—­

* * * * *

  He that made all the stars you daily read,
  And from them filch a knowledge how to feed,
  Hath hid this from you.  Your conjectures all
  Are drunken things, not how, but when they fall: 
  Man is his own star, and the soul that can
  Render an honest, and a perfect man,
  Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
  Nothing to him falls early, or too late. 
  Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;
  And when the stars are labouring, we believe