ut the finer and more imperceptible operations of love, in
its sentimental modifications, if the heart of the author does not
supply an example from its own feelings, cannot easily be studied at the
expense of others. Dryden's bosom, it must be owned, seems to have
afforded him no such means of information; the licence of his age, and
perhaps the advanced period at which he commenced his literary career,
had probably armed him against this more exalted strain of passion. The
love of the senses he has in many places expressed, in as forcible and
dignified colouring as the subject could admit; but of a mere moral and
sentimental passion he seems to have had little idea, since he
frequently substitutes in its place the absurd, unnatural, and
fictitious refinements of romance. In short, his love is always in
indecorous nakedness, or sheathed in the stiff panoply of chivalry. But
if Dryden fails in expressing the milder and more tender passions, not
only did the stronger feelings of the heart, in all its dark or violent
workings, but the face of natural objects, and their operation upon the
human mind, pass promptly in review at his command. External pictures,
and their corresponding influence on the spectator, are equally ready at
his summons; and though his poetry, from the nature of his subjects, is
in general rather ethic and didactic, than narrative of composition,
than his figures and his landscapes are presented to the mind with the
same vivacity as the flow of his reasoning, or the acute metaphysical
discrimination of his characters.

But the powers of observation and of deduction are not the only
qualities essential to the poetical character. The philosopher may
indeed prosecute his experimental researches into the _arcana_ of
nature, and announce them to the public through the medium of a friendly
_redacteur_, as the legislator of Israel obtained permission to speak to
the people by the voice of Aaron; but the poet has no such privilege;
nay, his doom is so far capricious, that, though he may be possessed of
the primary quality of poetical conception to the highest possible
extent, it is but like a lute without its strings, unless he has the
subordinate, though equally essential, power of expressing what he feels
and conceives, in appropriate and harmonious language. With this power
Dryden's poetry was gifted in a degree, surpassing in modulated harmony
that of all who had preceded him, and inferior to none that has