But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the language of Christianity:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
The like contrast holds between Dryden and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly fair to take an example from Dryden’s poems on religion; they are rational arguments on difficult topics, after this fashion:
In doubtful questions ’tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say;
For ’tis not likely we should higher soar
In search of heaven than all the church before.
When Dryden writes in his most fervent and magnificent style, he writes like this:
I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes,
For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David’s Foes be this the Doom,
May all be like the Young-man Absalom;
And for my Foes may this their Blessing be,
To talk like Doeg and to write like Thee.
Nor is it fair to bring Shelley’s lame satires into comparison with these splendors. When Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he writes:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Some of the great poets of the Romantic Revival took mediaeval literature for their model, but they did more than that. They returned to the cult of wild nature; they reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the language. A description by any professional reporter of any Royal wedding is further from the truth to-day
than it was in the eighteenth century. The average writer is looser and more unprincipled.