Next to this poet's astonishing ease, spirit, and elastic vigour, may be ranked his clear, sharp intellect. He may be called more a logician than a poet. He reasons often, and always acutely, and his rhyme, instead of shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his "Religio Laici" and the "Hind and Panther" resemble portions of Duns Scotus or Aquinas set on fire. Indeed, keen, strong intellect, inflamed with passion, and inspirited by that "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 differs from mysticism, inasmuch as it is