Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/419

Rh long intertexture of complicated clauses, and as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

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.

His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense however of his words is strained; when "he views the Ganges from Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps. And the pedant surely intrudes, (but when was blank verse without pedantry?) when he tells how "Planets absolve the stated round of Time." Rh