The first line of the
following passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding ones
are less familiar:--
"Men are but children of a larger growth,
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too and full as vain;
And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room,
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing;
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind,
Works all her folly up and casts it outward
In the world's open view."[71]
The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains grace
for it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written _seeing_ for
_viewing_, thus gaining the strength of repetition in one verse and
avoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much
given to correction, and indeed one of the great charms of his best
writing is that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior
man in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes
fervent rather than imaginative; his thought does not incorporate itself
in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself
in simile. Where he _is_ imaginative, it is in that lower sense which the
poverty of our language, for want of a better word, compels us to call
_picturesque_, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct which
suggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it
taxes more the imagination of the reader.
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