The words do dance indeed; and "Cowley's Medley" combines the Polka and the Gallopade.
Yet throughout these Two Odes (the Second Olympic and the First Nemæan) may be detected flowing the poetry of Pindar. Compare Cowley with him—book in hand—and ever and anon you behold Pindar. Cowley all along had him in his mind—but Cowley's mind played him queer tricks—his heart never; yet had he a soul capable of taking flight with the Theban eagle. There are many fine lines, sentimental and descriptive, in these extraordinary performances. There is sometimes "a golden ferment" on the page, which, for the moment, pleases more than the cold correctness of Carey. For example—The Isle of the Blest.
"Far other lot befalls the good;
A life from trouble free;
Nor with laborious hands
To vex the stubborn lands,
Nor beat the billowy sea
For a scanty livelihood.
But with the honour'd of the gods,
Who love the faithful, their abodes;
By day or night the sun quits not their sphere,
Living a dateless age without a tear.
The others urge meanwhile,
Loathsome to light their endless toil.
But whoso thrice on either side
With firm endurance have been tried,
Keeping the soul exempted still
Through every change from taint of ill,
To the tower of Saturn they
Travel Jove's eternal way.
On that blest Isle's enchanted ground,
Airs from ocean breathe around;
Burn the bright immortal flowers,
Some on beds, and some on bowers,
From the branches hanging high;
Some fed by waters where they lie;
Of whose blossoms these do braid
Armlets, and crowns their brows to shade.
Such bliss is their's, assured by just decree
Of Rhadamanth, who doth the judgment share
With father Saturn, spouse of Rhea, she
Who hath o'er all in heav'n the highest chair.
With them are Peleus, Cadmus number'd,
And he, whom as in trance he slumber'd,
His mother Thetis wafted there,
Softening the heart of Jove with prayer,
Her own Achilles, that o'erthrew
Hector, gigantic column of old Troy,
And valiant Cycnus slew,
And Morning's Æthiop boy."
Carey.
"Whilst in the lands of unexhausted light
O'er which the godlike sun's unwearied light,
Ne'er winks in clouds, nor sleeps in night,
An endless spring of age the good enjoy,
Where neither want does pinch, nor plenty cloy.
There neither earth nor sea they plow,
Nor ought to labour owe
For food, that whilst it nourishes does decay,
And in the lamp of life consumes away.
Thrice had these men through mortal bodies past,
Did thrice the tryal undergo,
Till all their little dross was purged at last,
The furnace had no more to do.
There in rich Saturn's peaceful state
Were they for sacred treasures placed—
The Muse-discovered world of Islands Fortunate.
Soft-footed winds with tuneful voyces there
Dance through the perfumed air.
There silver rivers through enamell'd meadows glide,
And golden trees enrich their side.
Th' illustrious leaves no dropping autumn fear,
And jewels for their fruit they bear,
Which by the blest are gathered
For bracelets to the arm, and garlands to the head.
Here all the heroes and their poets live,
Wise Radamanthus did the sentence give,
Who for his justice was thought fit
With sovereign Saturn on the bench to sit.
Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.
Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,
Since his blest mother (who before
Had try'd it on his body in vain)
Dipt now his soul in Stygian lake,
Which did from thence a divine hardness take,
That does from passion and from vice invulnerable make."
Carey's commencement is dull—his close is good—but the whole will never, on this earth, be gotten by heart. Cowley's conceits are cruel in Pindar's case—yet, in spite of them, there is a strange sublimity in the strain—at the end moral grandeur. Reginald Heber and Abraham Moore—especially Reginald—excel Carey; but Pindar in English is reserved for another age.
Dryden dashed at every poet—Theocritus, Lucretius, Persius, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, Homer—each in his turn unhesitatingly doth he take into his translating hands. In his Essay on Satire, he compares with one another the three Roman Satirists; but though he draws their characters with his usual force and freedom of touch, they are not finely distinctive—if coloured con amore, yet without due consideration. In the Preface to the Second Miscellany, he says of Horace's Satires, that they "are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be preferred to raillery and declaiming." In his Essay, he says, "In my particular opinion, Juvenal is the more delightful writer." And again—"Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home; his spleen is raised, and he raises mine. I have the pleasure of concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him. * * * His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice more vehement; his spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny and all the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty, than with a temporizing poet, a well-manner'd court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place, who is ever decent because he is naturally servile." Is this Quintus Horatius Flaccus!
In Dryden and Juvenal are met peer and peer. Indignant scorn and moral disgust instigated the nervous hand of Juvenal, moulded to wield the scourge of satire. He is an orator in verse, speaking with power and command, skilled in the strength of the Roman speech, and practised in the weapons of rhetoric. But he is nevertheless a poet. Seized with impressions, you see his sail caught with driving gusts, if his eye be on the card. He snatches images right and left on his impetuous way, and flings them forth suddenly and vividly, so that they always tell. Perhaps he is more apt at binding a weighty thought in fewer words than his Translator, who felt himself as this disadvantage when he expressively portrayed the Latin as "a severe and compendious language." The Roman satirist has more care of himself; he maintains a prouder step; and the justifying incentive to this kind of poetry, hate with disdain of the vices and miseries to be lashed, more possesses his bosom. And what a wild insurrection of crimes and vices! What a challenge to hate and disdain in the minds in which the tradition of the antique virtues, the old mores, those edifiers of the sublime Republic, had yet life! Rome under Nero and Domitian! Pedants have presumed to question the sincerity of his indignation, and have more than hinted that his power of picturing those enormous profligacies was inspired by the pleasure of a depraved imagination. Never was there falser charge. The times and the topics were not for delicate handling,—they were to be looked at boldly in the face,—and if spoken of at all, at full, and with unmistakable words.
There is no gloating in his eyes when fixed in fire on guilt. Antipathy and abhorrence load with more revolting colours the hideous visage, from which, but for that moral purpose, they would recoil. But what, it may be asked, is the worth and use of a satire that drags out vices from their hiding-holes to flay them in sunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more comprehensively. The things told are—the corruption of our own spirit has engendered them—and every great city, in one age or another, is a Rome. Consult Cowper. To know such things is one bitter and offending lesson in the knowledge of our nature. For the pure and simple such records are not written. It is a galling disclosure, a frightful warning for the anomalous race of the proud-impure. Gifford finely said of this greatest of satirists, that, "disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he laboured with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display." The loveliness of virtue! Ay, in many a picture of the innocence and simplicity of the olden time—unelaborate but truthful—ever and anon presented for a few moments to show how happy humanity is in its goodness, and how its wickedness is degradation and misery. And there are many prolonged lofty strains sounding the praise of victorious virtue. They are for all time—and they, too, that magnify and glorify the spirit of liberty, then exiled from the city it had built, and never more to have dominion there, but regnant now in nations that know how to prize the genius it still continued to inspire when public virtue was dead.
Yet Dryden has not been altogether successful with Juvenal. In many places he is most slovenly—in many elaborately coarse beyond the coarseness ready-made to his hand—in some of the great passages, he leaves out what he feared to equal, and, in the face of all the principles in his own creed on Translation, he often paraphrases with all possible effrontery, and lets himself loose to what is called imitation, till the original evanishes, to return, however, on a sudden, apparition-like, and with a voice of power, giving assurance of the real Juvenal.
His criticism on Lucretius is characteristic of them both. See how rashly, we had almost said foolishly, he rates the Epicurean for his belief in the mortality of the soul. Were there no better reason afforded by the light of nature, for a belief in its immortality than what Dryden throws out, human nature would not so earnestly have embraced, and so profoundly felt, and so clearly seen, the truth of the Christian dispensation.