To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin."

Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have
condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as his
own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lain
fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven
"heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell. The versification is smoother,
but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is
modelled after "Gondibert." A single image from nature (he was almost
always happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden:--

"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."

Two other verses,

"And the isle, when her protecting genius went,
Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred,"

are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early
poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one
of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan
poet.

"From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent."

This is the more curious because, twenty-four years afterwards, he says,
in defending rhyme: "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the