[54] He never compassed even a smoothness
approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet
of the earlier school,--
"Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her open throat,
A clear, unwrinkled song,"--
one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Those
poets indeed
"Felt music's pulse in all her arteries ";
and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank verse
was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the
most difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, by
variety of pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody of
rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but
rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed
pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking
metre for rhythm.
Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the
awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves
of rhyme. But he considers the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on
the whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How
did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at the
French manner? He fell into every one of its vices, without attaining
much of what constitutes its excellence.
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