"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed.
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made,"
in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's
"Walls, grown thin, permit the mind
To look out thorough and his frailty find."
Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seem that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote: "Others there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors.
They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.
You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your middle-finger."[53] It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their verse. "Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, and his importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but mischief.[54] He never compassed even a smoothness approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of the earlier school,—
"Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her open throat,
A clear, unwrinkled song,"—
one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Those poets indeed
"Felt music's pulse in all her arteries ";
and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the most difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, by variety of pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm.