hat "ardour and impetuosity of mind"
which Wordsworth is compelled to allow to him, rather than creative or
original genius, is the differentia of Dryden. We have compared him to a
courser, but he was not one of those coursers of Achilles, who fed on no
earthly food, but on the golden barley of heaven, having sprung from the
gods--

[Greek: Xanthon kai Balion, to ama pnoiaesi, petesthaen.
Tous eteke Zephuro anemo Arpua Podargae.]

Dryden resembled rather the mortal steed which was yoked with these
immortal twain, the brood of Zephyr and the Harpy Podarga; only we can
hardly say of the poet what Homer says of Pedasus--

[Greek: Os kai thnaetos eon, epeth ippois athanatoisi.]

He was _not_, although a mortal, able to keep up with the immortal
coursers. His path was on the plains or table-lands of earth--never or
seldom in "cloudland, gorgeous land," or through the aerial altitudes
which stretch away and above the clouds to the gates of heaven. He can
hardly be said to have possessed the power of sublimity, in the high
sense of that term, as the power of sympathising with the feeling of the
Infinite. Often he gives us the impression of the picturesque, of the
beautiful, of the heroic, of the nobly disdainful--but never (when
writing, at least, entirely from his own mind) of that infinite and
nameless grandeur which the imaginative soul feels shed on it from the
multitudinous waves of ocean--from the cataract leaping from his rock,
as if to consummate an act of prayer to God--from the hum of great
assemblies of men--from the sight of far-extended wastes and
wildernesses--and from the awful silence, and the still more mysterious
sparkle of the midnight stars. This sense of the presence of the
_shadow_ of immensity--immensity itself cannot be felt any more than
measured--this sight like that vouchsafed to Moses of the "backparts" of
the Divine--the Divine itself cannot be seen--has been the inspiration
of all the highest poetry of the world--of the "Paradise Lost," of the
"Divina Commedia," of the "Night Thoughts," of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
of "Festus," and, highest far, of the Hebrew Prophets, as they cry,
"Whither can we go from Thy presence? whither can we flee from Thy
Spirit?" Such poets have resembled a blind man, who feels, although he
cannot see, that a stranger of commanding air is in the room beside him;
so they stand awe-struck in the "wind of the going" of a majestic and
unseen Being. This feeling diffe