"
"Fear's a large promiser; who subject live
To that base passion, know not what they give."
"The secret pleasure of the generous act
Is the great mind's great bribe."
"That bad thing, gold, buys all good things."
"Why, love does all that's noble here below."
"To prove religion true,
If either wit or sufferings could suffice,
All faiths afford the constant and the wise."
But Dryden, as he tells us himself,
"Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme;
Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground."
The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacular
to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim
as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought
become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of
the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom:
Anthony says,
"How I loved,
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours
That _danced away with down upon your feet_."
And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more
fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the
following passage?
"I feel death rising higher still and higher,
Within my bosom; every breath I fetch
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass,
_And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air_.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86