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THE PLAIN.
But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man
of honoured name,--Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be
dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art
and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of
sobriety, let him search Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: Dr. Watts's Lyrics
are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the
incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the
imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The
sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his
mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr.
Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the
vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how
little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling
itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the
feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is
crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional
good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his
seventy-five Lyrics sacred to Devotion. His objectivity and boldness of
thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament
that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a
Christian.
Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.
I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it
is.
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