re hew'd with many a wound,
Out-spins the streaming blood, and dyes the ground."

This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It
does not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and
images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general
horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry.
There is not a metaphor, such as "he _laugheth_ at the shaking of a
spear," in it all.

In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural
imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges the
case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single
image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this minute
taken up the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from nature in
one page:--

"As where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,
A rank sour herbage rises on the green;
So," &c.

And a few lines down:--

"As where the lightning runs along the ground,
No husbandry can heal the blasting wound."

And some pages farther on occurs a description of Spring, not unworthy
of Wordsworth himself; beginning--

"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As _God had been abroad_, and walking there,
Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the year."

Still it is true, that, taking his writings as a whole, they are thin in
natural images; and even those which occur, are often rather the echoes
of his reading, than the results of his observation. And what Wordsworth
adds is, we fear, true; in his translation of Virgil, where Virgil can
be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the
passage. The reason of this, apart from his want of high imaginative
sympathy, may be found in his long residence in London; and his lack of
that intimate daily familiarity with natural scenes, which can alone
supply thorough knowledge, or enkindle thorough love. Nature is not like
the majority of other mistresses. Her charms deepen the longer she is
known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the
narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the
microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life.
The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an
appetite was not Dryden's.

Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has
very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and fu