Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/159

Rh prejudice. Of Thomson’s Seasons he says: ‘His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used; Thomson’s wide expansion of general views, and his enumeration of circumstantial varieties, would have been obstructed and embarrassed by the frequent intersections of the sense which are the necessary effects of rhyme. His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful.’ Of Young’s Night Thoughts he says: ‘This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme.’ As for Milton—‘I cannot wish his work,’ says Johnson, ‘to be other than it is; yet like other heroes he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.’

Blank verse, therefore, is permitted to poets who would describe wide landscapes, or indulge unfettered imagination, or express conceptions of superhuman majesty in unusual and gorgeous language. Such poets are warned, in the essay on Akenside, of the risk they run: ‘The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.’