John Dryden "Forgiveness to the injured does belong; But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong." "Few know the use of life before 'tis past." "Beware the fury of a patient man. 66 Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below." "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bonds divide." "None but the brave deserves the fair." "War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honor, but an empty bubble." "Sweet is pleasure after pain." "For friendship, of itself a holy tie, Is made more sacred by adversity." He paid a tribute to Milton in a few lines almost universally known: Three poets, in three distant ages born, That Milton ranks with Homer and Virgil becomes evident from a comparative study of their great epics. The Ode for St. Cecilia's Day written four years before his death, is Dryden's crowning lyric. The following account is given of its composition: Mr. St. John, afterward Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On inquiring the cause, I have been up all night,' replied the old bard. My musical friends made me promise to write them an ode for their feast of St. Cecilia. I have been so struck with the subject that occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting,' and immediately he showed him this ode, which places British lyric poetry above that of any other nation." Dryden died in 1700 at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 "Whatever the world may think of me or my poetry is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works written since the days of my early youth, contains a line which I would wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature. This is a comfort to me; I can do no mischief by my works when I am gone." And this quotation from the man himself describes one of the best characteristics of his poetry. None of his verse is defiled by moral allusion or suggestiveness, and only pure thoughts and the beauties of nature are set forth. James Russell Lowell classes Wordsworth as the fifth in succession of the great English poets." Stopford A. Brooke calls him the greatest English poet of this century. But his actual rank is not of so much importance as the influence he held over modern poesy. With Pope as the chief exponent of the classic spirit, English poetry had come to be as artificial as anything created by man. Its rules were as arbitrary and as rigidly observed as the rules for constructing a house. Form and manner were everything, and it described the glitter of court and city rather than the beauties of the country. It had a language all its own, a language that was |