The poet in
Dryden was never more fully revealed than in such verses as these:--
"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,[40]
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand";
"Silent in smoke of cannon they come on";
"And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men";
"The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies,
And adds his heart to every gun he fires";
"And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well,
Whom Rupert led, and who were British born."
This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that there is scarcely
a quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, and
there are too many swaggering with that _expression forte d'un sentiment
faible_ which Voltaire condemns in Corneille,--a temptation to which
Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in
kind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such are the
verses in which he describes the dreams of the disheartened enemy:--
"In dreams they fearful precipices tread,
Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore,
Or in dark churches walk among the dead";
and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees where
"The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose,
And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes.
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