All that these two worthy people are trying to say is
Almahide. I love you; and so well that I dare not trust myself or you to stay.
Almanzor. Can you tell me you have power and will to save my life and at that instant kill!
Dryden makes Almahide describe her own emotional condition and, as is proper at any critical moment in Heroic Drama, drop into simile. Almanzor, too, confidently diagnoses his own condition and apostrophizes fate. All this was quite correct in its own day, not for real life, but for the people of the myth land conjured up by the dramatic theories of the litterati. Did people under such circumstances speak in this way? Surely not.
This scene from George Barnwell, 1731, illustrates the same substitution of an author’s idea of what is effective because “literary” for a phrasing that springs from the real emotion of perfectly individualized figures.
SCENE 7. Uncle. George Barnwell at a distance
Uncle. O Death, thou strange mysterious power,—seen every day, yet never understood but by the incommunicative dead—what art thou? The extensive mind of man, that with a thought circles the earth’s vast globe, sinks to the centre, or ascends above the stars; that worlds exotick finds, or thinks it finds—thy thick clouds attempts to pass in vain, lost and bewilder’d in the horrid gloom; defeated, she returns more doubtful than before; of nothing certain but of labour lost.
(During this speech, Barnwell sometimes presents the pistol and draws it back again; at last he drops it, at which his uncle starts and draws his sword.)
Barnwell. Oh, ’tis impossible!