In another place, of David,
Yet bid him go securely, when he sends;
’Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends.
The man who has his God, no aid can lack;
And we who bid him go, will bring him back.
Yet amidst his negligence he sometimes attempted an improved and scientific versification; of which it will be best to give his own account subjoined to this line:
Nor can the glory contain itself in th’ endless space.
“I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes, which I would have observed in divers other places of this poem, that else will pass as very careless verses: as before,
And over-runs the neighb’ring fields with violent course.
“In the second book:
Down a precipice deep, dowse he casts them all—
“And,
And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care.
“In the third,
Brass was his helmet, his boots brass, and o’er
His breast a thick plate strong brass he wore.“In the fourth,
Like some fair pine o’er-looking all the ignobler wood.
“And,
Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong.
“And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is, that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that, out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind themselves to; neither have our English poets observed it, for aught I can find. The Latins (qui musas colunt severiores) sometimes did it; and their prince, Virgil, always: in whom the examples are innumerable, and taken notice of by all judicious men, so that it is superfluous to collect them.”
I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only sound and motion. A “boundless” verse, a “headlong” verse, and a verse of “brass” or of “strong brass,” seem to comprise very incongruous and unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line expressing “loose care,” I cannot discover; nor why the “pine” is “taller” in an Alexandrine than in ten syllables.
But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of representative versification, which perhaps no other English line can equal:
Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise:
He, who defers this work from day to day,
Does on a river’s bank expecting stay
Till the whole stream that stopp’d him shall be gone,
Which runs, and, as it runs, for ever shall run on.
Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroic of ten syllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestic, and has therefore deviated into that measure when he supposes the voice heard of the Supreme Being.
The author of the “Davideis” is commended by Dryden for having written it in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an heroic poem; but this seems to have been known before by May and Sandys, the translators of the “Pharsalia” and the “Metamorphoses.”
In the “Davideis” are some hemistichs, or verses left imperfect by the author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended to complete them; that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably concluded, because this truncation is imitated by no subsequent Roman poet; because Virgil himself filled up one broken line in the heat of recitation; because in one the sense is now unfinished; and because all that can be done by a broken verse, a line intersected by a cœsura, and a full stop, will equally effect.