In reading the second line, with its frequent recurrence of the aspirate, one seems to hear the giant pantings and groanings of Sisyphus; and a similar feeling is experienced in reading the following line:
“And when up ten steep slopes you’ve dragged your thighs.”
Crowe, the now forgotten author of “Lewisdon Hill,” fairly rivals Pope in the closing line of a version of the foregoing passage in the “Odyssey”:
“A sudden force
Turned the curst stone, and, slipping from his hold,
Down again, down the steep rebounding, down it rolled.”
An able literary critic,—the Rev. Robert A. Willmott,—has thus contrasted the majestic and easy verse of Dryden with the “mellifluence” of Pope. “‘The mellifluence of Pope,’ as Johnson called it, has the defect of monotony. Exquisite in the sweet rising and falling of its clauses, it seldom or never takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise. If Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden cage, and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement. But Dryden’s versification has the freedom and the freshness of the fields.... This is a great charm. He preserved the simple, unpremeditated graces of the earlier couplet, its confluence and monosyllabic close, while he added a dignity and a splendor unknown before. Pope’s modulation is of the ear; Dryden’s of the subject. He has a different tone for Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by the fountain side; for the startled knight, who listens to strange sounds within the glooms of the wood; and for the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a compliment.”
In the following lines from “Il Penseroso,” the effect combines both sound and motion:
“Oft on a plat of rising ground,