Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins of later Romantic
poetry. Pope's morality has little enough of the religious character:
Know then this truth (enough for Man to know),
Virtue alone is Happiness below.
But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the language of Christianity:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
The like contrast holds between Dryden and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly
fair to take an example from Dryden's poems on religion; they are
rational arguments on difficult topics, after this fashion:
In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say;
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar
In search of heaven than all the church before.
When Dryden writes in his most fervent and magnificent style, he writes
like this:
I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes,
For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King _David's_ Foes be this the Doom,
May all be like the Young-man _Absalom_;
And for my Foes may this their Blessing be,
To talk like _Doeg_ and to write like Thee.
Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires into comparison with these
splendors. When Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he writes:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
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