s tracing in it an imitation of
Fairfax's Tasso. The fact seems to be that Waller, with a good ear, had
a very limited theory of verse. He worshipped smoothness, and sought it
at every hazard. He preferred the Jacob of a soft flowing commonplace to
the rough hairy Esau of a strong originality, cumbered with its own
weight and richness. We think that this excessive love of the soft, and
horror at the rude, materially weakened his genius. The true theory of
versification lies in variety, and in accommodation to the necessities
and fluctuations of the thought. The "Paradise Lost," written in
Waller's rhyme, would have been as ridiculous as Waller's love to
Saccharissa expressed in Milton's blank verse. The school before Waller
were too rugged, but surely there is a medium between the roughness of
Donne, and the honied monotony of the author of the "Summer Islands."
The practice of running the lines into one another, severely condemned
by Johnson, and systematically shunned by Waller, has often been
practised with success by poets far greater than either--such as Shelley
and Coleridge. It is remarkable that Dryden, while he praised, did not
copy our poet's manner, but gave himself freer scope. Pope, on the other
hand, pushed his love of uniform tinkle and unmitigated softness to
excess, and transferred this kind of luscious verse from small poems,
where it is often a merit, to large ones, where it is a mistake. In his
"Iliad," for instance, the fierce ire of Achilles, the dignified
resentment of Agamemnon, the dull courage of Ajax, the chivalrous
sentiment of Hector, the glowing energy of Diomede, the veteran wisdom
of Nestor, the grief of Andromache, the love of Helen, the jealousy of
Juno, and the godlike majesty of Jupiter, are all expressed in the same
sweet and monotonous melody--a verse called "heroic," by courtesy, or on
the principle of contradiction, like _lucus a non lucendo_. In Waller,
however, his poems being all, without exception, rather short, you never
think of quarrelling with his uniformity of manner; and rise from his
lines as from a liberal feast of hot-house grapes, thankful, but feeling
that a _few more_ would have turned satisfaction into nausea. Yet you
feel, too, that perhaps his selection of small themes, and the
consequent curbing of his powers, have sprung from his fastidiousness in
the matter of versification. The sermons, the satires, the speeches, the
odes, and the didactic poems of the fastidi