Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845Various
Philosophy
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Dryden felt the effusion of beauty, and has rendered and enhanced it. One
may question the fitness of a material alteration which he has ventured
upon. The allegory of the old Poem is pure. Dryden has changed the Knights
and Ladies, collectively, into Fairies; for any thing that appears,
indeed, of good human stature. The thought came to him apparently as
making the beauty more beautiful, and possibly as obtaining, to an
otherwise indefinite sort of imaginary beings, a known character and a
recognized hold upon poetical--succeeding to popular--belief. A
contradiction is--that the company of the Leaf have, in emphatic and
chosen terms, been described as INNUMERABLE. The laurel is of such
enormous diffusion, that A HUNDRED persons might repose under it. Yet IT
SHELTERS THEM ALL FROM THE STORM.
It is also singular to us, that the Margarete or Daisy should suffer any
slight from Chaucer, seeing the reverence with which he elsewhere regards
it. It is here, too, no doubt raised into reverence by the observance of
the Flower party; but then it suffers disparagement inasmuch as they are
disparaged.
Truly does the amiable Godwin say--"In a word, the Poem of Dryden,
regarded merely as the exhibition of a soothing and delicious luxuriance
of fancy, may be classed with the most successful productions of human
genius. No man can read it without astonishment, perhaps not without envy,
at the cheerful, well-harmonized, and vigorous state of mind in which the
author must have been at the time he wrote it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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