DRYDEN. 319 



&quot; I m pleased with my own work ; Jove was not more 

 With infant nature, when his spacious hand 

 Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, 

 To give it the first push and see it roll 

 Along the vast abyss.&quot;* 



I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy 

 than our thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. 

 But if he have not the potent alchemy that transmutes 

 the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as 

 Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is 

 always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not 

 added so much as some have done to the stock of bullion 

 which others afterwards coin and put into circulation, there 

 are few who have minted so many phrases that are still a 

 part of our daily currency. The first line of the following 

 passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding 

 ones are less familiar : 



&quot; 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.&quot;t 



The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the 

 thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare 

 would have written seeing for vieiving, 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 imagina 

 tive ; 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 

 * Cleomenes. t All for Love. 



