But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose.  So, too, the time had likewise come when our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised.  It was impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century shows us that the freedom was not achieved without them.  Still, the freedom was achieved; the preoccupation, an undoubtedly baneful and retarding one if it had continued, was got rid of.  And as with religion amongst us at that period, so it was also with letters.  A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul.  The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.  The men of letters, whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.  But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repression and silencing of poetry.

We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century.  For the purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable.  Do you ask me whether Dryden’s verse, take it almost where you will, is not good?

  “A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
  Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged."[104]

I answer:  Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an age of prose and reason.  Do you ask me whether Pope’s verse, take it almost where you will, is not good?

  “To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down;
  Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own."[105]

I answer:  Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of prose and reason.  But do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from men with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness, has poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity?  Do you ask me whether the application of ideas to life in the verse of these men, often a powerful application, no doubt, is a powerful poetic application?  Do you ask me whether the poetry of these men has either the matter or the inseparable manner of such an adequate poetic criticism; whether it has the accent of

  “Absent thee from felicity awhile ... "

or of

  “And what is else not to be overcome ... "

or of