In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon tells
Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still
her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it." Goldsmith's
fancy was taken by it; and everybody admires in the "Traveller" the
extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthening chain. The
smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over
shallow water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if
we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in
mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the
ludicrousness of the image:--
"And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain."
To write imaginatively a man should have--imagination!
[34] See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For the
other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic
Poetry" (1697).
[35] In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shakespeare
"was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, invented
that kind of writing which we call blank verse!" Dryden was never, I
suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He seems never
to have known that Surrey translated a part of the "Aeneid" (and with
great spirit) into blank verse.
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