The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II | Page 3

shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his
"Religio Laici" and the "Hind and Panther" resemble portions of Duns
Scotus or Aquinas set on fire. Indeed, keen, strong intellect, inflamed
with passion, and inspirited by that "ardour and impetuosity of mind"
which Wordsworth is compelled to allow to him, rather than creative or
original genius, is the differentia of Dryden. We have compared him to
a courser, but he was not one of those coursers of Achilles, who fed on

no earthly food, but on the golden barley of heaven, having sprung
from the gods--
[Greek: Xanthon kai Balion, to ama pnoiaesi, petesthaen.
Tous eteke
Zephuro anemo Arpua Podargae.]
Dryden resembled rather the mortal steed which was yoked with these
immortal twain, the brood of Zephyr and the Harpy Podarga; only we
can hardly say of the poet what Homer says of Pedasus--
[Greek: Os kai thnaetos eon, epeth ippois athanatoisi.]
He was not, although a mortal, able to keep up with the immortal
coursers. His path was on the plains or table-lands of earth--never or
seldom in "cloudland, gorgeous land," or through the aerial altitudes
which stretch away and above the clouds to the gates of heaven. He can
hardly be said to have possessed the power of sublimity, in the high
sense of that term, as the power of sympathising with the feeling of the
Infinite. Often he gives us the impression of the picturesque, of the
beautiful, of the heroic, of the nobly disdainful--but never (when
writing, at least, entirely from his own mind) of that infinite and
nameless grandeur which the imaginative soul feels shed on it from the
multitudinous waves of ocean--from the cataract leaping from his rock,
as if to consummate an act of prayer to God--from the hum of great
assemblies of men--from the sight of far-extended wastes and
wildernesses--and from the awful silence, and the still more mysterious
sparkle of the midnight stars. This sense of the presence of the shadow
of immensity--immensity itself cannot be felt any more than
measured--this sight like that vouchsafed to Moses of the "backparts"
of the Divine--the Divine itself cannot be seen--has been the inspiration
of all the highest poetry of the world--of the "Paradise Lost," of the
"Divina Commedia," of the "Night Thoughts," of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, of "Festus," and, highest far, of the Hebrew Prophets, as
they cry, "Whither can we go from Thy presence? whither can we flee
from Thy Spirit?" Such poets have resembled a blind man, who feels,
although he cannot see, that a stranger of commanding air is in the
room beside him; so they stand awe-struck in the "wind of the going"

of a majestic and unseen Being. This feeling differs from mysticism,
inasmuch as it is connected with a reality, while the mystic dreams a
vague and unsupported dream, and the poetry it produces is simply the
irresistible cry springing from the perception of this wondrous Some
One who is actually near them. The feeling is connected, in general,
with a lofty moral and religious nature; and yet not always, since, while
wanting in Dryden, we find it intensely discovered, although in an
imperfect and perverted shape, in Byron and Rousseau.
In Dryden certainly it exists not. We do not--and in this we have
Jeffrey's opinion to back us--remember a single line in his poetry that
can be called sublime, or, which is the same thing, that gives us a
thrilling shudder, as if a god or a ghost were passing by. Pleasure, high
excitement,--rapture even, he often produces; but such a feeling as is
created by that line of Milton,
"To bellow through the vast and boundless deep,"
never. Compare, in proof of this, the description of the tournament in
"Palamon and Arcite"--amazingly spirited as it is--to the description of
the war-horse in Job; or, if that appear too high a test, to the contest of
Achilles with the rivers in Homer; to the war of the Angels, and the
interrupted preparations for contest between Gabriel and Satan in
Milton; to the contest between Apollyon and Christian in the "Pilgrim's
Progress;" to some of the combats in Spenser; and to that wonderful
one of the Princess and the Magician in midair in the "Arabian Nights,"
in order to understand the distinction between the most animated literal
pictures of battle and those into which the element of imagination is
strongly injected by the poet, who can, to the inevitable shiver of
human nature at the sight of struggle and carnage, add the far more
profound and terrible shiver, only created by a vision of the
concomitants, the consequences--the UNSEEN BORDERS of the
bloody scene. Take these lines, for instance:--
"They look anew: the beauteous form of fight
Is changed, and war
appears a grisly sight;
Two troops in fair array one