"Profligate! You blaspheme!" Up started Bame, A little unsteady now upon his feet, And shaking his crumpled pamphlet over his head!
"Nay--if your pie be done, you shall partake A second course. Be seated, sir, I pray. We atheists will pay the reckoning! I had forgotten that a Puritan Will swallow Moses like a red-deer pie Yet choke at a wax-candle! Let me read Your pamphlet. What, 'tis half addressed to me! Ogs-gogs! Ben! Hark to this--the Testament Of poor Rob Greene would cut Will Shakespeare off With less than his own Groatsworth! Hark to this!" And there, unseen by them, a quiet figure Entered the room and beckoning me for wine Seated himself to listen, Will himself, While Marlowe read aloud with knitted brows. "'_Trust them not; for there is an upstart crow Beautified with our feathers!_' --O, he bids All green eyes open:--'_And, being an absolute Johannes fac-totum is in his own conceit The only Shake-scene in a country!_'" "Feathers!" Exploded Ben. "Why, come to that, he pouched Your eagle's feather of blank verse, and lit His Friar Bacon's little magic lamp At the Promethean fire of Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will Poached in that greenwood." "Ben, see that you walk Like Adam, naked! Nay, in nakedness Adam was first. Trust me, you'll not escape This calumny! Vergil is damned--he wears A hen-coop round his waist, nicked in the night From Homer! Plato is branded for a thief, Why, he wrote Greek! And old Prometheus, too, Who stole his fire from heaven!" "Who printed it?" "Chettle! I know not why, unless he too Be one of those same dwarfs that find the world Too narrow for their jealousies. Ben, Ben, I tell thee 'tis the dwarfs that find no world Wide enough for their jostling, while the giants, The gods themselves, can in one tavern find Room wide enough to swallow the wide heaven With all its crowded solitary stars."
"Why, then, the Mermaid Inn should swallow this," The voice of Shakespeare quietly broke in, As laying a hand on either shoulder of Kit He stood behind him in the gloom and smiled Across the table at Ben, whose eyes still blazed With boyhood's generous wrath. "Rob was a poet. And had I known ... no matter! I am sorry He thought I wronged him. His heart's blood beats in this. Look, where he says he dies forsaken, Kit!" "Died drunk, more like," growled Ben. "And if he did," Will answered, "none was there to help him home, Had not a poor old cobbler chanced upon him, Dying in the streets, and taken him to his house, And let him break his heart on his own bed. Read his last words. You know he left his wife And played the moth at tavern tapers, burnt His wings and dropt into the mud. Read here, His dying words to his forsaken wife, Written in blood, Ben, blood. Read it, '_I charge thee, Doll, by the love of our youth, by my soul's rest, See this man paid! Had he not succoured me I had died in the streets._' How young he was to call Thus on their poor dead youth, this withered shadow That once was Robin Greene. He left a child-- See--in its face he prays her not to find The father's, but her own. '_He is yet green And may grow straight_,' so flickers his last jest, Then out for ever. At the last he begged A penny-pott of malmsey. In the bill, All's printed now for crows and daws to peck, You'll find four shillings for his winding sheet. He had the poet's heart and God help all Who have that heart and somehow lose their way For lack of helm, souls that are blown abroad By the great winds of passion, without power To sway them, chartless captains. Multitudes ply Trimly enough from bank to bank of Thames Like shallow wherries, while tall galleons, Out of their very beauty driven to dare The uncompassed sea, founder in starless nights, And all that we can say is--'They died drunk!'"