Return with all thy torments here,
And let me hope, and doubt, and fear;
Oh, rend my heart with every pain,
But let me, let me love again.
I suppose what will strike most readers with regard to these lines is that they are decidedly fluent, and utterly commonplace. That, however, is not the light in which a critic of the last quarter of the eighteenth century would regard them. Amid the dead level of sing-song couplets, the milk-and-water decency of Hayley, the chill and prolix classicism of Pye, the ineffable mediocrity of a thousand Pratts and Polwheles—the fluency of Merry passed, according to the critic's leanings, for fire or for fustian; and the phraseology, which afterwards became hackneyed, was then startling. Take, for instance, Horace Walpole's criticism of the new poetic departure. “It is refreshing to read natural easy poetry, full of sense and humor, instead of that unmeaning, labored, painted style now in fashion of the Della Cruscas and Co., of which it is impossible ever to retain a couplet, no more than one could remember how a string of emeralds and rubies were placed in a necklace. Poetry has great merit if it is the vehicle and preservative of sense, but it is not to be taken in change for it.” Poetry the vehicle and preservative of sense—that is the critical canon which would have made Walpole as blind to Della Crusca's merits, had he happened to possess any, as it made him keen-sighted for his defects.
It may, nevertheless, be doubted whether Della Crusca would have caused so great a stir in literature, had it not been for several collateral circumstances, of which the first and most important was the appearance in the World, some ten days later, of “Anna Matilda,” with a poem entitled To Della Crusca, the Pen.
Oh, seize again thy golden quill,
And with its point my bosom thrill,
With magic touch explore my heart,
And bid the tear of passion start.