[P. 266.] the secret [hidden] soul. Milton’s “L’Allegro.”
[P. 267.] the golden cadences. “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv, 2, 126.
Sailing with supreme dominion. Gray’s “Progress of Poesy.”
sounding always. See p. [207] and n.
except poets. Cf. “On the Prose Style of Poets” in the “Plain Speaker”: “What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of rhythmus and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular sing-song of rhyme or blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense. I should almost guess the Author of Waverley to be a writer of ambling verses from the desultory vacillation and want of firmness in the march of his style. There is neither momentum nor elasticity in it; I mean as to the score, or effect upon the ear. He has improved since in his other works: to be sure, he has had practice enough. Poets either get into this incoherent, undetermined, shuffling style, made up of ‘unpleasing flats and sharps,’ of unaccountable starts and pauses, of doubtful odds and ends, flirted about like straws in a gust of wind; or, to avoid it and steady themselves, mount into a sustained and measured prose (like the translation of Ossian’s Poems, or some parts of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics) which is more odious still, and as bad as being at sea in a calm.” Hazlitt’s views on this question are peculiar, though his examples are well chosen. The more common opinion is that voiced by Coleridge in his remarks “On Style”: “It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre. For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of metre.” Works, IV, 342.
[P. 268.] Addison’s Campaign (1705), written in honor of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim, was described as “that gazette in rhyme” by Joseph Warton (1722-1800) in his “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope,” I, 29.
Chaucer. Cf. A. W. Pollard’s “Chaucer,” p. 35: “To Boccaccio’s ‘Teseide’ and ‘Filostrato,’ he was indebted for something more than the groundwork of two of his most important poems; and he was also acquainted with three of his works in Latin prose. If, as is somewhat hardily maintained, he also knew the Decamerone, and took from it, in however improved a fashion, the idea of his Canterbury Pilgrimage and the plots of any or all of the four tales (besides that of Grisilde) to which resemblances have been traced in his own work, his obligations to Boccaccio become immense. Yet he never mentions his name, and it has been contended that he was himself unaware of the authorship of the poems and treatises to which he was so greatly indebted.”
Dryden. His translations from Boccaccio are “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” “Theodore and Honoria,” “Cymon and Iphigenia.”
[P. 269.] married to immortal verse. “L’Allegro.”
John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of “Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678).