The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II | Page 4

moment showed--

The next, a field with fallen bodies strowed;
Not half the number in

their seats are found,
But men and steeds lie grovelling on the ground.

The points of spears are stuck within the shield,
The steeds without
their riders scour the field;
The knights, unhorsed, on foot renew the
fight--
The glittering faulchions cast a gleaming light;
Hauberks
and helms are hew'd with many a wound,
Out-spins the streaming
blood, and dyes the ground."
This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It does
not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and
images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general
horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry. There
is not a metaphor, such as "he laugheth at the shaking of a spear," in it
all.
In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural
imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges
the case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single
image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this
minute taken up the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from
nature in one page:--
"As where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,
A rank sour herbage
rises on the green;
So," &c.
And a few lines down:--
"As where the lightning runs along the ground,
No husbandry can
heal the blasting wound."
And some pages farther on occurs a description of Spring, not
unworthy of Wordsworth himself; beginning--
"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As God had been
abroad, and walking there,
Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the
year."
Still it is true, that, taking his writings as a whole, they are thin in

natural images; and even those which occur, are often rather the echoes
of his reading, than the results of his observation. And what
Wordsworth adds is, we fear, true; in his translation of Virgil, where
Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always
spoils the passage. The reason of this, apart from his want of high
imaginative sympathy, may be found in his long residence in London;
and his lack of that intimate daily familiarity with natural scenes, which
can alone supply thorough knowledge, or enkindle thorough love.
Nature is not like the majority of other mistresses. Her charms deepen
the longer she is known; and he that loves her most warmly, has
watched her with the narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest
glances of the microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an
antediluvian life. The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds
on;" but such an appetite was not Dryden's.
Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has
very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral
Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent;
but they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion
in the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course
of domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party
scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine
bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render
him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But
for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of his relative,
Honor Driden, you would have judged him from his works incapable of
a pure passion. "Lust hard by Hate," being his twin idols, how could he
represent human, far less ethereal love; and how could he touch those
springs of holy tears, which lie deep in man's heart, and which are
connected with all that is dignified, and all that is divine in man's nature?
What could the author of "Limberham" know of love, or the author of
"MacFlecknoe" of pity?
Wordsworth, in that admirable letter to which we have repeatedly
referred, says, "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is
mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes
of classes of men, or individuals." This is unquestionable. He never so

nearly reaches the sublime, as when he is expressing contempt. He
never rises so high, as in the act of trampling. He is a "good hater," and
expresses his hatred with a mixture of animus and ease, of fierceness
and of trenchant rapidity, which makes it very formidable. He only, as
it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of his
hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like
Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not rabid
and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into