"To prove religion true,
If either wit or sufferings could suffice,
All faiths afford the constant and the wise."
But Dryden, as he tells us himself,
"Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme;
Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground."
The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom: Anthony says,
"How I loved,
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours
That danced away with down upon your feet."
And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the following passage?
"I feel death rising higher still and higher,
Within my bosom; every breath I fetch
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass,
And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air."[67]
Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. The following passage seems to me tenderly full of it:—
"Something like
That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard;
But floods of woe have hurried it far off
Beyond my ken of soul."[68]
And this single verse from "Aurengzebe":—