Dryden.
No language can express the smallest part
Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart,
For you, whom best I love and value most:
But to your service I bequeath my ghost;
Which, from this mortal body when untied,
Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side;
Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend,
But wait officious, and your steps attend.
How I have loved—excuse my faltering tongue!
My spirit's feeble and my pains are strong:
This I may say I only grieve to die,
Because I lose my charming Emily.
To die when heaven had put you in my power!
Fate could not choose a more malicious hour.
What greater curse could envious fortune give,
Than just to die when I began to live?
Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave,
Now warm in love, now withering in the grave!
Never, O never more to see the sun!
Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone!
This fate is common; but I lose my breath
Near bliss, and yet not bless'd, before my death.
Farewell! but take me dying in your arms,
'Tis all I can enjoy of all your charms:
This hand I cannot but in death resign;
Ah, could I live! but while I live 'tis mine.
I feel my end approach, and thus embraced,
Am pleased to die; but hear me speak my last.
Ah, my sweet foe! for you, and you alone,
I broke my faith with injured Palamon:
But love the sense of right and wrong confounds;
Strong love and proud ambition have no bounds.
And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong,
I should return to justify my wrong;
For, while my former flames remain within,
Repentance is but want of power to sin.
With mortal hatred I pursued his life,
Nor he, nor you, were guilty of the strife;
Nor I, but as I loved; yet all combined,
Your beauty, and my impotence of mind;
And his concurrent flame that blew my fire;
For still our kindred souls had one desire.
He had a moment's right, in point of time;
Had I seen first, then his had been the crime.
Fate made it mine, and justified his right;
Nor holds this earth a more deserving knight,
For virtue, valour, and for noble blood,
Truth, honour, all that is comprised in good;
So help me Heaven, in all the world is none
So worthy to be loved as Palamon.
He loves you, too, with such a holy fire,
As will not, cannot, but with life expire;
Our vow'd affections both have often tried,
Nor any love but yours could ours divide.
Then, by my love's inviolable band,
By my long-suffering, and my short command,
If e'er you plight your vows when I am gone,
Have pity on the faithful Palamon.
This was his last; for Death came on amain,
And exercised below his iron reign.
Then upward to the seat of life he goes;
Sense fled before him, what he touch'd he froze:
Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw,
Though less and less of Emily he saw;
So, speechless for a little space he lay;
Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away.
But whither went his soul, let such relate
Who search the secrets of the future state:
Divines can say but what themselves believe;
Strong proofs they have, but not demonstrative;
For, were all plain, then all sides must agree,
And faith itself be lost in certainty.
To live uprightly, then, is sure the best;
To save ourselves, and not to damn the rest.
The soul of Arcite went where heathens go,
Who better live than we, though less they know.
In Palamon a manly grief appears;
Silent he wept, ashamed to show his tears.
Emilia shriek'd but once; and then, oppress'd
With sorrow, sunk upon her lover's breast:
Till Theseus in his arms convey'd, with care,
Far from so sad a sight the swooning fair.
'Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate;
Ill bears the sex a youthful lover's fate,
When just approaching to the nuptial state:
But, like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast,
That all at once it falls, and cannot last.
The face of things is changed, and Athens now,
That laugh'd so late, becomes the scene of woe:
Matrons and maids, both sexes, every state,
With tears lament the knight's untimely fate.
Nor greater grief in falling Troy was seen
For Hector's death, but Hector was not then.
Old men with dust deform'd their hoary hair;
The women beat their breasts, their cheeks they tear:
Why wouldst thou go, (with one consent they cry,)
When thou hadst gold enough, and Emily?
Dryden, you observe, exhibits various changes. Are they for the better or the worse? In the first place, he introduces a new motive into the conduct of Arcite—remorse of conscience. When fate has declared against him, and he finds that he cannot enjoy the possession of the prize which he has wrongfully won, his eyes open upon his own injustice, and he acknowledges the prior right of Palamon, who first had seen Emilie.
Does this innovation make good an ethical want in the rough and unschooled original? Or does it perplex the old heroic simplicity with a modern and needless refinement? By right of arms, by gift of the king, with her own gentle consent, Emelie was Arcite's. Death unsinews the hand that held her against the world. Let a few winged moments fleet, and she is his no more. He bows, conquered by all-conquering, alone unconquerable necessity. His love, which had victoriously expelled his cousin's from the field of debate, he carries with him to the melancholy Plutonic kingdom, and leaves the field of debate still—Palamon victor, and Emelie free. Really there seems to be something not only simpler in art, but more pathetic, and even morally greater, in the humble submission of the fierce and giant-like spirit to inevitable decree—in the spontaneous return of the pristine fraternal appreciation when death withdraws the disturbing force of rivalry—and in his voluntarily appointing, so far as he ventures to appoint, his brother in arms and his bride to each other's happiness—than in the inventive display of a compunction for which, as the world goes, there appears to be positively no use, and hardly clear room. Loftily viewing the case, a wrong has been intended by Arcite to Palamon, but no wrong done. He has been twice hacked and hewed a little—that is all; and it cannot be said that he has been robbed of her who would not have been his. Indeed, the current of destiny has so run, that the quarrel of the two noble kinsmen has brought, as apparently it alone could bring, the survivor to wedlock with his beloved. We suspect, then, that the attribution of the motive is equally modern with the style of the not ill-contrived witticism which accompanies the first mention of it—
"Conscience, that of all physick works the last,
Caused him to send for Emily in haste."
But that which, upon the general comparison of the two speeches, principally strikes us, is the great expansion, by the multiplying of the thoughts to which expression is given, by Dryden. With old Geoffrey, the weight of death seems actually to lie upon the tongue that speaks in few interrupted accents. Dryden's Moribund runs on, quite at his ease, in eloquent disquisition. Another unsatisfactory difference is the disappearing of that distinct, commanding purpose or plan, and the due proportion observed upon in the original. That mere cleaving desire to Emelie, felt through the first half in word after word gushing up from a heart in which life, but not love, ebbs, gets bewildered in the modern version among explications of the befallen unhappiness, and lost in a sort of argumentative lamentation. And do but just look how that "in his coldè grave," the only word, one may say, in the whole allocution which does not expressly appertain to Emelie, and yet half belongs to her by contrast—is extended, in Dryden, as if upon recollection of Claudio's complaint in "Measure for Measure," until, like that complaint, it becomes selfish.
But there is small pleasure in picking out the poetical misses of John Dryden. It was to be foreseen that he would be worsted in this place of the competition; for the pathetic was not his forte, and was Chaucer's. So, too, instead of the summary and concise commendation of his happier cousin to the future regard of the bereaved bride, so touching in Chaucer, there comes in, provoked by that unlucky repentance, an expatiating and arguing review of the now extinct quarrel, showing a liberty and vigour of thought that agree ill with the threatening cloud of dissolution, and somewhat overlay and encumber the proper business to which the dying man has now turned himself—made imperative by the occasion—the formal and energetic eulogy on Palamon. The praise, however, is bestowed at last, and handsomely.
Have we, think ye, gentle lovers of Chaucer, rightly understood the possibly somewhat obscure intention of the two verses at the beginning of our extract—