Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll;
The self-same doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age.”
I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines when he wrote a certain stanza of his “Greenland’s icy mountains.”
The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of the two professions of faith named, Charles II. had died, summoning a Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance—and, it is feared, a small one—of reconcilement with Heaven; furthermore, these enemies remembered that the bigot James II. had come to the throne, full of Papist zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith. Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe; may not be. Certainly neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I, have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is every man’s privilege.
How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James II.’s time, and author of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the Veni, Creator, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals.
“Creator Spirit, by whose aid
The world’s foundations first were laid,