"
Two other verses,
"And the isle, when her protecting genius went,
Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred,"
are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early
poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one
of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan
poet.
"From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent."
This is the more curious because, twenty-four years afterwards, he says,
in defending rhyme: "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the
abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, that
rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the
graces of it: which is manifest in his _Juvenilia_, ... where his rhyme
is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every
man a rhymer, though not a poet."[11] It was this, no doubt, that
heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lycidas" that "the diction was harsh,
the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's excuse
that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and
powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with
the most needful quality of an advocate,--to be always strongly and
wholly of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be.
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