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

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 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