shiver of human nature at the sight of struggle and carnage, add the far
more profound and terrible shiver, only created by a vision of the
concomitants, the consequences--the UNSEEN BORDERS of the bloody scene.
Take these lines, for instance:--

"They look anew: the beauteous form of fight
Is changed, and war appears a grisly sight;
Two troops in fair array one moment showed--
The next, a field with fallen bodies strowed;
Not half the number in their seats are found,
But men and steeds lie grovelling on the ground.
The points of spears are stuck within the shield,
The steeds without their riders scour the field;
The knights, unhorsed, on foot renew the fight--
The glittering faulchions cast a gleaming light;
Hauberks and helms are hew'd with many a wound,
Out-spins the streaming blood, and dyes the ground."

This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It
does not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and
images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general
horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry.
There is not a metaphor, such as "he _laugheth_ at the shaking of a
spear," in it all.

In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural
imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges the
case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single
image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this minute
taken up the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from nature in