‘An hollow crystal pyramid he takes,
In firmamental waters dipt above;
Of it a broad extinguisher he makes,
And hoods the flames that to their quarry drove.’
Nothing in Dryden is more amazing than his inequality. This stanza is succeeded by the following:
‘The vanquished fires withdraw from every place,
Or, full with feeding, sink into a sleep;
Each household genius shows again his face,
And from the hearths the little Lares creep.’
Other quatrains are still better, as, for instance, this on the burning of St. Paul’s:
‘The daring flames peeped in, and saw from far
The awful beauties of the sacred quire;
But since it was profaned by civil war,
Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.’
A thought so striking, that the reader does not pause to reflect that the celestial sentence would have been equally applicable to every cathedral in the country. Perhaps the following stanzas compose the passage of most sustained excellence. In them, as in the apostrophe to the Royal Society, in an earlier part of the poem, Dryden appears truly the vates sacer, and his poetry becomes prophecy:
‘Methinks already from this chymic flame
I see a city of more precious mould;
Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,
With silver paved, and all divine with gold.
‘Already labouring with a mighty fate
She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow,
And seems to have renewed her charter’s date,
Which heaven will to the death of Time allow.
‘More great than human now, and more august,
Now deified she from her fires doth rise;
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And opening into larger parts she flies.
‘Before, she like some shepherdess did show,
Who sat to bathe her by a river’s side;
Not answering to her fame, but rude and low,
Nor taught the beauteous arts of modern pride.